At around midday, the weakest member, Hugh McEwan fell in three times. The first time, James Bryson, the despised one, managed to pull him out, the second time, he scrambled out on his own, but the third time, the ice closed over his face and he was lost. Two of the smallest boys were left. Some hours later, about five miles from the shore, Hugh McGinnes, whose bare feet were swollen, sat down and said he could go no further. They had to leave him. For a good ten minutes as they struggled on, they could hear him ‘greeting’. He could not have lasted long: his skin showed through his ragged trousers. On they went, the depleted band of four, one young man, two youths and one small boy, John Paul, who, although barefooted, must have had some extra powers of endurance. Later he said that he had run away to sea for a pleasure sail! He was comfortable at home. He lived with his mother but did not tell her that he was going. He chose the Arran because she was a good ship. He did not know the captain.
The long day passed and they reached the rim of the icefield. One mile of deep, open water lay between them and the houses on the shore-line. Reilly, Bryson and Brand had, surprisingly, been allowed to bring with them some pieces of wood and a batten from the ship, and they tried to ferry across on separate floats of ice, using the wood as paddles. John Paul, one supposes, stood and watched. Just then, a woman looking out to sea saw them, and a boat was sent over to rescue them, as the sun was going down.
Three of the boys never left the safety of St George’s Bay until it was time to go home. When he was strong enough, the fourth, Bernard Reilly, made his way southwards to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to seek work. Meanwhile, the ice had creaked loose and released the Arran, set free to sail across the gulf of St Lawrence and up the St Lawrence River to Quebec. From harbour there, a member of the crew who could not get the hellish incidents out of his mind, wrote a graphic letter on June 10th to his people in Greenock: ‘The boys were thinly clad, and were not able to stand the severe cold. The men could hardly stand it, let alone them...’ His account was received with horror by the relatives of the missing boys and a hostile crowd was waiting on the quay when the Arran came up the Clyde on July 30th. A boarding party would have attacked the two officers, who locked themselves in the cabin. The police were called to the disturbance, a near riot, but the crowd did not disperse for many hours.
Worse violence might have occurred if it had then been known that two of the children put out on the ice had in fact been lost. The writer of the letter from Quebec did not know. Nor did the captain and the mate. Next day, those two were arrested, taken before the Sheriff and charged with assault. Both were committed for trial and bail was refused. As a part of his enquiries, the procurator fiscal had telegraphed to the police force at St John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, and report was now received that two stowaways had died. The prisoners were further charged with murder.
The trial was held back until Brand, Bryson and Paul were brought from Newfoundland and were fit to give evidence. They were taken first in a schooner to St John’s on the far eastern coast of the island, and there transferred to the brigantine Hannah and Bennie, which was the property of the Provost of Greenock. Home they came on October 1st, well-fed and clothed, to face their new ordeal of a solemn trial in the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh, which occupied three days from November 23rd, 1868. Both captain and mate were now charged and indicted with assault and culpable homicide (manslaughter) not murder, and both relied upon a straight denial. Their declarations read out in court were plainly outrageous humbug. The captain swore that he ‘invited’ the boys to leave the ship and have a ‘run’ on the ice. ‘I pointed out to them houses on the shore, and said to them they might have a fine run ashore.’ He denied forcing them to leave but did admit that he ‘of course, told them to go’. The mate, against all the very strong evidence, denied the scrubbing and flogging of James Bryson, or that he had compelled the stowaways to leave the ship.
The three survivors present gave corroborative accounts of the cruel sequence, and members of the crew examined for the Crown found themselves strongly criticised for not interceding. Said one George Henry, ‘I had no right to interfere with my master and mate: I was a servant.’ But, asked a juryman, ‘If the master or mate had been going to murder the boys would you have interfered?’ The reply was oblique: ‘There was a chance of their reaching the shore, and some of them did reach it.’ In those violent times, when an officer would fell a crewman with a blow and think nothing of it, or clap him in irons on suspicion of mutiny, the plight of those who watched is understandable.
In the comparable Martha and Jane case of 1857, ten years earlier, Captain Henry Rogers, a native of Aberdeen, had inflicted terrible tortures on a seaman named Andrew Rose, who was a ‘little weak in the head’. During the voyage from Barbados to Liverpool, the first and the second mate contributed to the unmistakable acts of sadism. Some of the crew gave Rose a little pea-soup and some water when he was crammed into a water-cask for 12 hours, with only the bunghole for ventilation, but one of the mates found out and reacted with so much rage that they dared not to interfere again. Andrew Rose did die, and his three tormentors, found guilty of murder, were sentenced to death. The captain hanged but the mates were reprieved. There is little doubt here that, short of mutiny, the crew were powerless to help.
For the defence, they put up 12-year-old Peter Currie, the boy who had been spared, and he contributed the unlikely information that he heard the mate say that he would wager any man on board £20 the boys would be back to their dinner! The Arrans steward, and the boatswain, both indicated that the captain was a kind, quiet man, who rarely interfered with the discipline of the ship. One of them did allow that he thought it was possible for a man to reach the land over the ice, but not for boys so clad. It had not been his place to question the captain. Then two strong witnesses were called as to character. The chaplain of the Seaman’s Friend Society, Greenock, said that Captain Watt was so well disposed to boys that it was generally believed that they liked to stow away with him on that account! This seems a preposterous proposition, but we may receive the evidence of the parish minister of Ardrossan and four of his parishioners as to the probity of the captain with less scepticism.
In the famous case of the mutiny on the Veronica(1902), Captain Shaw, who was murdered by the mutineers, was a hard man to serve under, but regarded as quiet and inoffensive among his equals ashore. The editors of the Notable British Trials volume on the case, Professor Keeton and John Cameron, remark that ‘The two estimates of Captain Shaw are not necessarily contradictory.’ No character witnesses are recorded in the aid of the mate of the Arran, and, giving up, he changed his plea to guilty of assault, at the close of the evidence for the defence, whereupon the Solicitor-General withdrew the charge of culpable homicide against him. (All knew that he had stood back from forcing the boys who were unwilling over the rails, but who knows who first conceived the plan as captain and mate walked on the ice?)
George Young, for the defence, objected to the pomposity of the Crown’s address. His own spirited points grate and jar, even if they lack barristerial pomposity: it was obvious, he said, that the boys belonged to the very worst class, and although not all guilty of theft on board, they did at any rate force the master to provide them with food which was not intended for their consumption. It could hardly be expected that they should be sumptuously fed. Neither was it reasonable to suppose that a merchant vessel would be equipped with spare clothing for the use of stowaway boys. The washing of the dirty lad, Bryson, was not done with a gentle hand, as on an infant, but as a remedial lesson. The flogging had not injured him.
Coming now, as a late argument, and against the substance of the prisoners’ previous declarations, to the serious charge, Counsel put it to the jury that, a few days before they left for good, the boys had been put on the ice to give them a fright, and were taken on board again. Reilly and Bryson seemed to have entered into an agreement to try the ice (true) and asked the smaller boys to join them. The captain realised th
at the attempt was fraught with some danger, and although he permitted and probably pressed the little boys to go along with the bigger ones, he was at the same time under the impression that they would return as soon as they saw the perils. (Yet he did not send out a search party, nor did he ever make any enquiries as to their fate.) He did not drag the boys from the ship. Anyway, Counsel continued sickeningly, there was no reliable evidence as to death. It would surprise no-one if both McEwan and McGinnes were to turn up alive and well.
In his summing-up, however, the Lord Justice-Clerk was satisfied that the children were compelled to leave the Arran by threats and force. A very small show of compulsion on the part of a man in authority was sufficient to make them do things against their will. The captain had said that they had better die on the ice than on board the ship. The verdict was that the captain was guilty of culpable homicide, but not of assault. On account of his previous good character, the jury recommended him to the leniency of the Court. The captain was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment, and the mate to four months’. Loud hisses greeted this astonishing result. We shall name the judge: it was George Patton, who sat only from 1867 to 1869.
Captain and mate served their time, and returned to sea. Captain Watt was said to have died within a year or two, at Pensacola, Florida, which port, incidentally, supplied the sailors responsible for the brutal Veronica mutiny. Mate Kerr lived long. Peter Currie died of consumption at the age of 14. James Bryson emigrated with his father and family to America, where James worked as a streetcar conductor. John Paul, the toughest little boy, became a foreman riveter and died in due course at Itchen, Southampton. David Brand was the most successful: he emigrated to Townsville, North Queensland and founded the engineering firm of Brand, Dryborough and Burns. But once you have heard the story, it is very difficult to forget the two boys who did not survive, pushed out on to the ice by a captain reckless as to whether they lived or died.
CHAPTER 14
THE TOAD IN THE TUNNEL
The tradename for the Garvie case, south of the Border at least, is a ‘cut-throat’ trial, in which co-accused require separate counsel, because each blames the other. This case of 1968, with its three accused, is a study in victimology. Maxwell Robert Garvie, the murdered husband, was the primal victim. He was also, along a chain of causation, the victim of his own lusts, and, disputably, of the age in which he lived – the swinging 60s – whose values he invoked to excuse his bad behaviour. Sheila Garvie, his wife, was a victim of Max Garvie’s cruelty, and her own victim. Brian Gordon Tevendale, her lover, convicted with her of the murder, had been drawn into Garvie’s perversions and to that extent was the older man’s victim. Alan Peters, found Not Proven, was Tevendale’s henchman in the disposal of the body, and was under the influence of Tevendale. Peters was probably afraid of him, as he claimed, if only at the material time, and was Tevendale’s victim.
Strong women’s issues are attached to the case of Sheila Garvie. Her upbringing was repressive, and there was rebellion in her nature. Her father, a sober stonemason, was puritanical and bad-tempered. He was employed on the royal estates at Balmoral and Sheila was placed there in the castle as a domestic servant. Seeing no brightness in life, she escaped to office work and at a dance caught the eye of Max Garvie, a Young Farmer, her social superior who farmed at ‘West Cairnbeg’, in the Kincardineshire Mearns. On June 11th, 1955 they married. He was 21 and she was 18. In marrying, she moved into another kind of domestic servitude – that of a hostess to farming friends, required to put on bigger and better ‘spreads’. In their sexual relationship he cared only for his own gratification and called her frigid. Three children were born, two girls, and in 1964, a son.
Sheila had done well but she was not happy. Garvie was unpredictable and suffered from chronic boredom – not a philosophical ennui, but an immature need to spark off the moment to die now and live later. The action man part of him took to flying; he founded a club and flew his own German-built Bolkow Junior. He enjoyed buzzing cars and boats in true Hitchcock-fashion. Connubial missionary-style sex bored him. One thing led to another. He turned to erotic photography, forced nudism on his unwilling wife and tried to involve their young daughters. The naturists’ club that he set up was said to have been called ‘Kinky Cottage’ by local residents. Very conscious that he was living in the permissive society (he said as much), he moved on to ‘wife-swapping’ and ‘orgies’, and encouraged Brian Tevendale, the 22-year-old son of a former Army Provost for Scottish Command, to pay attention to Sheila. Trudy Birse, Tevendale’s sister and married to Alfred Birse, a policeman, was for Max Garvie.
At least twice, Garvie was violent towards Sheila. Once he threatened to shoot her. She was afraid of him. Although Trudy pleased him more than Sheila, he remained a possessive husband with a dominant personality. Sheila found his sexual demands of her disgusting and perverted. He seems to have been a polymorphous pervert! Reading between the lines, for she would never say, he was of Mellors’ inclination – a fair reference since the Lady Chatterley trial was fresh in people’s minds and was to pop up at the Garvie trial. Sheila began to suffer from depression quite early in the marriage. He drank heavily, always looking for stimulation, downing perhaps five bottles of whisky a week and taking ‘handfuls’ of Pro-Plus (a caffeine compound still on sale over the counter today), especially as an aid to flying, together with the addictive sleeping-pill, Soneryl, a butobarbitone. We can only imagine the drugs to which he would have been drawn in the 1990s – Ecstasy, no doubt, would have been at the top of his list.
All this time, Max Garvie kept on farming well enough with the help of a grieve, although Sheila complained that farming magazines went straight into the wastepaper-basket, unlike the stream of pornographic magazines. He was a man obsessed. It was useless for fringe friends, business associates, fellow-flyers to deny the other side of the Young Farmer, because, although lies were to fly in the court of trial, Sheila Garvie’s own mother, Mrs Edith Watson, a painfully upright woman, knew all about it and testified so. She was the last person in the world to lie about the state of her daughter’s marriage, since, as we shall see, she was the one who exposed the murder.
Then Sheila and Brian Tevendale discovered that they loved each other. It became an increasingly disintegrative picture, with scenes, departures and returns. Garvie was impossible to cope with. He threatened to put her away in a clinic in London. It is a sad aspect of the case that the abused wife appealed for help from her mother, a solicitor, a clergyman, and a hotelier who became involved, but they all urged her to stick with her husband for the sake of the children. So far, this morality tale of the sixties sounds like the setting for a wife-murder, but Max Garvie it was who disappeared. He was last seen alive on the evening of May 14th 1968, heading homewards.
Officially, he was a missing man. Sheila and Tevendale were spotted around together, enjoying each other’s company. Sheila’s mother disapproved and on August 14 she went to the police in some agony of mind and physical collapse to inform them that Sheila had indicated to her that Garvie was dead and had not died naturally. She said that Brian Tevendale was ‘a strong man at her back’. Sheila had obviously not known where the body was to be disposed of, because she had asked her mother about the seatides, when, as soon emerged, Tevendale (helped by Peters) had had a different inspiration for concealment of the body.
Sheila Garvie and Tevendale were arrested on that same day, and Alan Peters somewhat later. Quite soon, Tevendale led the police to an underground tunnel or culvert running from Lauriston Quarry to the west side of Lauriston Castle, near the village of St Cyrus. Along that tunnel the police saw by torchlight a pile of stones on which a large toad was squatting. There is an old folklore belief that a toad hopping over your foot is a presage of death. Underneath this subterranean cairn, they found the body of Max Garvie, the ‘flying farmer’, grounded now for ever. There was a gunshot wound of the neck and the skull was fractured.
Tevendale’s statement to the police spared
Alan Peters, whom he did not mention, but blamed Sheila, although only to the extent of a most extraordinary accident. His version, which was not believed, was that Sheila had called him to come down to the farmhouse. He found her in a terrible state, saying that her husband had died accidentally. He had required her to do something unnatural with a rifle. She had refused, there had been a struggle, and the gun had gone off. He, Tevendale, had disposed of the body for her.
Alan Peters’ statement implicated Tevendale and Sheila Garvie and set out a premeditated murder at which he himself was present but passive. He had helped with the removal and concealment of the body – this was never disputed. Several weeks previously, Peters said, Tevendale had brought it up that he wanted to get rid of the bloke and asked him if he would come with him to provide transport. On the night, they parked on the road at the back of ‘West Cairnbeg’, went from there into the garage and ‘Mrs Garvie let us into the house Tevendale got the gun from the back of the door and they went through into the sitting-room. Mrs Garvie gave them a drink and then she showed them to a room upstairs. They waited until Mr Garvie came home and went to bed and when he was asleep Mrs Garvie came through and told them. Then they (and from the context he seems to mean only the two men) went through and Tevendale hit Mr Garvie on the head with the butt of the gun and then shot him.
Classic Scottish Murder Stories Page 16