Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China

by Paul French

  And then came Kiukiang, a posting that led to a national scandal. When a Chinese man was killed on the Kiukiang Bund in 1909, the Chinese accused an Englishman called Mears, who just happened to be the head of the British police in the treaty port. Werner, as consul and judge, held a hearing in camera, calling only one witness, a British doctor, and declared Mears innocent.

  The Chinese protested. Was this British justice? It smacked of a cover-up. There was a boycott of British goods. The other foreigners in Kiukiang, mostly merchants who needed to remain on good terms with the Chinese, thought Werner was arrogant to have provoked local anger in this way, and the vocal business community demanded his sacking. Not that Werner could have won, whatever he’d chosen to do. Had he offered up Mears for jail, British face would have been lost.

  George Morrison, otherwise known as ‘Morrison of Peking’—who was also a vicious little gossip—wrote to his Times of London editor in 1910:

  Unfortunately we have a very inferior Consul at Kiukiang, an eccentric named E.T.C. Werner, a man not on speaking terms with the majority of the community. When I was last in Kiukiang the British Commissioner of Customs feelingly complained to me that though stationed in the same port with this poisonous Consul he received no extra pay for so being. Werner has largely contributed to the trouble and will have to go home.

  The case went higher, to Sir John Jordan, His Majesty’s ambassador envoy extraordinary and plenipotentiary to China, a tough and proud Ulsterman who wanted no troublesome consuls on his watch. And from there it went to the British Parliament in London. It became a national embarrassment. The maintenance of British prestige meant that Werner was given a pass in public, but behind the scenes it was asked whether he was fit for duty.

  His final posting was Foochow, where in a defiant and typically British stand he was simultaneously promoted and given a warning: Here you are, but now hear this—no more trouble.

  These were chaotic times across China. The last of the imperial dynasties, the Qing, had been tossed out and a presidential republic ushered in. The ailing and impotent Qing government had become too corrupt and too weak to resist the increasingly rapacious territorial and preferential-trading demands of the European great powers. By 1911 the Chinese army had had enough, and in October that year it revolted. Chaos ensued until Dr Sun Yat-sen returned to China from exile in the United States. He pulled together the fractious opposition, and in February 1912 proclaimed the formation of the Republic of China, becoming its first president.

  The Forbidden City was thrown open as the imperial family and their eunuchs were sent packing. Chinese men cut off their pigtails, which had for so long symbolised Manchu dominance over the Han Chinese. But through all this turmoil, Foochow remained relatively quiet, becoming a backwater as the tea trade slowly died.

  Despite Werner’s recent marriage to Gladys Nina, he was not happy in the port town, describing the posting as ‘earthly purgatory.’ He spent his time collating statistics on Foochow’s falling tea exports, and the minutiae of the port’s major trade in bamboo shoots and lacquered furniture. He was reputedly not on speaking terms with half his staff. He refused to fit in, pointedly avoiding the Foochow Club, the centre of English expat life, and making it known that he didn’t drink and thought little of people who did. It was all bound to come to a head.

  And it did—spectacularly so. Werner was reputedly in open argument with eight of the thirty-five male members of the Foochow Club and had strained relations with the rest of them. In 1913 he became convinced that one, a man called Blackburn, a popular type, highly regarded and married with a family, had been spying on Gladys Nina as she undressed in her bedroom at the consulate. Werner accused the man of being a Peeping Tom.

  Then he got into a fight with a British official at the Customs Service over some trifling matter. It escalated, and eventually Werner and Gladys Nina stormed the Foochow Club together one night with riding crops in their hands, upsetting tables, startling the regulars, disrupting the bridge games. They then proceeded to beat and whip the Customs Service officer as he scrambled around the bar-room floor on his knees, trying to escape their blows.

  It was too much. The pair were undignified, they appeared deranged; the British community in Foochow complained loudly to Ambassador Jordan in Peking. This was the second time he’d had trouble from Werner, and Jordan decided he was too unstable and had to go.

  Werner had risen higher than any of his contemporaries among the 1884 intake of Foreign Service cadets. He’d been the youngest of them all and had become the most successful. And he had married extremely well. But he also fell the furthest. Actually getting fired from the British diplomatic service in China was a difficult thing to achieve, and in fact only one official had previously ever been ousted—a man called Higgs, who was sacked by John Jordan in 1913 for marrying a widow. The staunchly Presbyterian Jordan thought that was unbecoming of a man in the service. To hush it up, a job was found for Higgs and his new wife with the British Military Mission in Siberia, and the disgraced Higgs wrapped himself up and headed north to the frozen wastes of the Russian Empire, there to contemplate the sin of loving a widow.

  Shortly after the Foochow incident, Werner was recalled to London and virtually accused of being insane. He fought his detractors, but Jordan was determined not to have Werner back on his watch—the man was a confirmed atheist, for goodness’ sake. He’d dabbled in Theosophy, attended lectures by Indian mystics.

  The government declared Werner sick; he found doctors who pronounced him fit as a fiddle. The government looked for excuses; Werner believed he was the wronged party and protested loudly. But nobody listened. Werner was friendless, the government resolute. Whitehall forced the issue, but made sure Werner was decently pensioned.

  Werner saw conspiracies in all this—his German heritage was being used against him as the war clouds gathered over Europe. He offered himself for service at the front but was turned down by the War Office, who claimed he was too old. He saw prejudice; he grabbed at the role of outsider, assuming his usual belligerent damn-the-consequences attitude. He was the product of a wealthy family, an English public school and the diplomatic service, but somehow—smart, dedicated and determined as he was—he’d never quite been part of the Empire clan, was never really a fully paid-up member of the Establishment, never invited into the old boys’ club. He had placed himself in juxtaposition to them, and now he was being left outside and the doors were closed. It was members only.

  Werner was retired just as World War I commenced. He was forty-nine. He received a full and generous pension, but with his reputation for being unsociable, unstable, stubborn and dour, there was no way back in to service with the British government for him. Frustrated, angry and bitter, Werner and Gladys Nina booked a passage back to Peking and a new life.

  Bar-room gossip. Foreigners drinking too much in their closeted and tight-knit clubs. Dennis knew the signs, and took every tale about Werner with a grain of salt. Wherever there was too much booze and too few people, petty jealousies and rivalries intensified. Small places, especially the goldfish bowls of foreign Peking and Tientsin, were highly combustible. And how much more explosive were the tiny, claustrophobic postings like Pagoda Anchorage, Kiukiang and Foochow of twenty and thirty years ago; these were smouldering pits where bored expats had nothing to do but twist the knife.

  A resistance to fitting in with the foreign community in those places was definitely odd, rare for sure, but it wasn’t a crime. And striking a monk or horsewhipping a Peeping Tom was hardly a precursor to grotesque murder. But the rumours around the death of Gladys Nina were harder to shrug off as the result of petty rivalries and jealousies. These rumours had surfaced immediately at the time of her death, and now, following the murder of Pamela, they were swirling again.

  It wasn’t just Gladys Nina’s death that had been hotly debated for years in Peking, but her life with Werner. None of the gossips agreed on much, but they did agree that she was a beauty, a catch for Werne
r. The snobbishly inclined, of which Peking had more than its fair share, noted that he had punched well above his weight and she had married beneath her station. The Ravenshaws were one of England’s oldest families, and plenty of foreigners in Peking believed that marrying Werner had been the undoing of Gladys Nina.

  Just as there seemed to be two Pamelas, split between her seemingly mundane existence in Tientsin and her fast-paced life in Pe-king, so there appeared to be two Gladys Nina Ravenshaws—one an attractive woman who lived life to the full, the other a bedridden invalid. Those who’d known Gladys Nina since her girlhood reflected on her once vibrant personality and her sudden deterioration. Werner, when he wrote or spoke about his wife, always referred to her long years of suffering, her weak constitution, her incapacitating illnesses. The two Gladys Ninas, just like the two Pamelas, were hard to reconcile.

  Commissioner Thomas had given Dennis a copy of a book Werner published in 1922 called Autumn Leaves, a strange miscellany ranging from essays on the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer to Theosophy and spiritualism, the nature of the universe, and symbolic disfigurement among certain tribes in China. The book’s frontispiece consisted of a full-page portrait of Gladys Nina Chalmers Werner. An earlier photograph, taken on their wedding day on the steps of St John’s in Hong Kong, showed Werner looking a full twenty years older than his bride. She was taller than he, and neither was smiling; they seemed more resigned than anything. Perhaps it was just the times, the stiff formality of the British upper classes in 1911, combined with Hong Kong’s humidity, even in December. If there were any guests at the cathedral that day, they were not recorded.

  When the couple returned to Peking in 1915, following Werner’s forced retirement, things seemed to go well at first. Werner filled his days working on his books and papers, and lecturing at Peking University. Gladys Nina was thought to be happy—she was considered one of the best dancers in Peking, and on the few occasions when the former consul and his wife had to move in society for appearances’ sake, she showed she was still lively and active. The couple seemed to have put the horsewhipping and Peeping Tom episodes behind them.

  But then Gladys Nina changed. People said it was as if the life was seeping out of her. She was ‘like a frightened sparrow in a painted cage,’ recalled one person who knew her well. She grew pale, became listless, found herself confined to bed. She consulted the best foreign doctors in Peking and for a while was under the care of a French practitioner named Dr Bussière, who had been personal physician to the Chinese republic’s second president and successor to Dr Sun, Yuan Shih-kai. But just as he’d ultimately done nothing for the president—China’s so-called Strong Man died in his bed—so he could do little for Gladys Nina, and her health continued to slide.

  Nobody could say what was wrong with her. Gladys Nina had a brother-in-law, John McCreery, who was regarded as one of the leading physicians in the United States. He too was consulted, but could give no answers. Werner claimed that his wife had had a cardiac condition since she was a child, but people who’d known her dismissed this as nonsense. Werner was insistent, and claimed she also had neurasthenia, an illness which, in the early part of the twentieth century, was thought to be psychopathological, affecting mostly women and causing bouts of fatigue and depression.

  Exactly why Gladys Nina and Werner chose to adopt a child was unclear. Some rumours had it that she became too sickly to conceive, others that the marriage was never consummated. Whatever the reason, if Gladys Nina had hoped that bringing a new bundle of energy into her life in the form of Pamela would prove a tonic, she was wrong. As her health continued to spiral downwards, she could not find the energy to care for her daughter, a task that was relegated to amahs. The supposedly eminent Dr Bussière prescribed solutions of salt and gold, which were injected straight into Gladys Nina’s veins. The needles were thick, the veins hard to find, and the puncture wounds left large yellow bruises on her arms, but the treatment actually seemed to work.

  Werner then sent her to the United States for several months’ rest with her sister Eileen and brother-in-law Dr McCreery. They lived on an estate called Quiet Water in Greenwich, Connecticut, and there Gladys Nina seemed to rally. But when she returned to Peking, she suffered an attack of influenza, and then was hit by meningitis. This was too much for her frail body, and she died, aged just thirty-five.

  Her mother in England died shortly afterwards, some said of a broken heart at losing her. In the space of a couple of months, eight-year-old Pamela had lost both her mother and grandmother.

  While Werner mourned, Peking gossiped. Tragedy and disaster followed him, people said. He had nearly drowned as a boy in Mexico, in the shark-infested harbour at Vera Cruz during a storm. Later he had survived a railway crash in London, and after that a collision of ships during fog in the English Channel. Visiting Naples, he had fallen through a skylight onto the roof of an office building, but miraculously got up and walked away. In Hankow in 1898 he escaped a terrible fire that engulfed the city, destroying a square mile of housing and killing over a thousand people.

  He led a charmed life, it was said, while those around him died. In Tientsin in the 1890s he’d been caught in the British Concession as a mob retaliated after a Chinese was killed in a fracas. Ten French nuns were slaughtered, and half a dozen other Europeans killed. In the turmoil of 1911, as the Qing dynasty collapsed, Werner escaped the massacring rebels while others around him were beheaded and disembowelled.

  He had faced down bandits while on a solitary horseback tour of Mongolia and returned to tell the tale of his search for the tomb of Genghis Khan. He’d encountered more bandits while attempting to travel the length of the Great Wall. On the island of Taiwan he had fallen ill in the jungles of the hinterland but managed to walk to civilisation unaided.

  Werner seemed to attract death and destruction, yet was always able to escape. Whenever he was asked about this, he would mockingly recite from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: ‘When you and I beyond the veil are past / Oh, but the long, long while the world shall last.’

  And it seemed he could kill, too. In remote Kiukiang Werner had been caught up in a violent anti-British insurrection: a mob of angry Chinese surrounded the small and poorly defended British Consulate compound. Werner found an insurrectionist pouring petrol on the roof, intending to burn it down with all the staff and their families inside. Werner did not hesitate: he shot the arsonist dead at point-blank range.

  The fact that Werner, following Gladys Nina’s death, continued to claim that she’d been sickly since childhood only fuelled the gossip. Her friends continued to vehemently deny it, but Werner remained insistent, calling her death an ‘inexplicable act of God’ and a ‘blessed relief,’ and declaring himself ‘desolate’ without her.

  The truth was that Gladys Nina had died from an overdose of Veronal, confirmed at her inquest and recorded as such by the British Legation’s assiduous record keepers.

  In 1922, death by an overdose of Veronal set alarm bells ringing. A barbiturate, Veronal was an upper-class drug of choice and had been since it hit the market in 1903. It was medically prescribed for everything from toothache to insomnia, influenza to depression, but anyone who read the newspapers knew it was also a way for the better-off to end it all.

  There had been a lot of precedents. In 1912, in a seedy room above Jimmy the Priest’s saloon in New York, playwright Eugene O’Neill, his marriage on the rocks, attempted suicide with cheap whisky and Veronal. A year later, a depressed Virginia Woolf also tried to kill herself with the drug, having been given it in a nursing home to help her sleep. In 1917 Stephanie ‘Baby’ Primrose and Catharine ‘Topsy’ Compton-Burnett, sisters of the popular novelist Ivy, died in a suicide pact after taking Veronal in their locked bedroom on Christmas Day. It was the celebrity drug for the new century.

  But while Veronal was a popular choice, it could take more than twenty-four hours to die from an overdose. The Compton-Burnett sisters died because they locked themselves away; Virginia Wool
f and Eugene O’Neill survived because people found them. Would not Werner, who claimed to be forever at his wife’s side in her last days, have noticed an overdose in the space of twenty-four hours?

  People wondered. And they drew their own conclusions. For every suicide attempt with Veronal, there was another story of murder. DCI Dennis had known sensational cases of murder by Veronal while at Scotland Yard.

  Werner had appeared to be the grieving husband as he stood by the graveside at Peking’s British Cemetery, where she was to be buried, so Werner said, ‘beneath the trees and flowers she loved so well.’ On that cold February day in 1922, the child Pamela stood beside her father, doubtless not quite understanding what was happening. Werner recited ‘To the Mothers,’ a poem by Marion Couthoy Smith, Gladys Nina’s favourite poet, who’d been popular during World War I:

  Mothers of men, have you not known

  That the soul of the child is not your own?

  If God has sealed him for palm and cross,

  To hold him close were your bitter loss.

  And now, in yet another tragedy, Werner was preparing to bury Pamela, in the same cemetery, in the same grave. Dennis knew there could be no reinvestigation of Gladys Nina’s death, but the story gave him pause for thought.

  Dennis couldn’t help thinking too of Pamela’s own tragic life—being given up for adoption and then so quickly losing her adoptive mother, followed soon after by her maternal grandmother. Her maternal grandfather, Charles Withers Ravenshaw, died at the family estate in Essex two years before Pamela was murdered, never having met his adopted granddaughter or seen his daughter’s faraway grave.