Bloody Valentine

by Douglas Skelton

  The sensational nature of the trial prompted some of the good and solid citizens, who had things to add to the Crown case, to request they be excused from giving evidence. Doctors’ notes were produced and excuses were given as they tried to distance themselves from the racy events.

  Meanwhile, in a note, the procurator fiscal said that the witnesses were more or less respectable, ‘except numbers 67 to 71 who are connected to houses of ill fame’. One of these witnesses was out of town, obviously on the run with her husband for whom there was a warrant on a charge of assault. She said she would return if her expenses were met. With these delicate matters in mind, the procurator fiscal thought it might be advisable to accommodate the witnesses of higher rank separately from the domestic servants, tradesmen and those connected with houses of ill fame.

  While some witnesses were doing what they could to get out of being associated with the case, the public at large was fascinated with the scandal. As was now the custom in such high profile trials, tickets were issued for those with influence to get into the courtroom without having to crowd with the lower ranks and a special notice was posted regarding the conduct of the trial to begin on Tuesday 7 May 1878. One of the strictures was that ‘no money be taken at the doors for admission to any part of the court’. There had been occasions in the past, including the 1844 trial of Christina Gilmour for poisoning her husband, when doorkeepers had allegedly taken cash for access to the public galleries.

  Chantrelle had his lawyers contact the procurator fiscal regarding items of clothing he wanted to wear in prison and at the trial. They were a fancy black cloth frock coat, dark tweed trousers and braces, six collars, six pairs of cuffs, six pocket handkerchiefs, hat, black gloves, sprung boots (new), hairbrush, comb, clothes brush. Clearly, he intended looking his best for his public performance.

  Chantrelle’s defence team could do little to counteract the evidence against their client. They tried to show that the medical evidence was largely inconclusive, that no poison was found in the body, that the symptoms displayed by the deceased prior to death did not fully fit that of opium poisoning but that was all they could do. And, at the end of their cross examination, a rather petulant Chantrelle demanded, ‘Is that all the evidence for the defence?’

  Despite this, Chantrelle was still convinced he would be acquitted and had even arranged for a cab to be waiting outside the courtroom to whisk him away as soon as he was free. However, at the end of the four-day trial, the jury took less than an hour to find him guilty. Chantrelle, surprised that his protestations of innocence had not been believed, asked to say a few words. He then proceeded to claim that someone else had rubbed the opium into the vomit. He began to ramble and grow excited, forcing the Lord Justice Clerk to cut him short, telling him, if he had anything further to say, to do so through his lawyer.

  As he sat in the condemned cell at Calton Jail, Chantrelle seemed to resign himself to his fate. However, he did not, like many others, take refuge in religion even though he was certain he would be ‘sharing a pipe with the Devil’. On his last night, instead of indulging in prayer, he replied, when asked if he had any last requests, ‘Three bottles of champagne and sex.’ Naturally, this was not supplied but he did enjoy a breakfast of coffee, eggs and bread and butter. He did take part in a religious service prior to his final walk but this was unlikely to have been motivated by any need for forgiveness. When asked if he had anything to get off his chest, he announced, ‘I have no confession to make.’

  At 7.30 a.m. on Friday 31 May 1878, the official witnesses gathered in the yard of Calton Jail for the hanging. It was an occasion for some degree of pomp. The magistrates were magnificently robed and carried long white poles. Police and prison officers were resplendent in dress uniforms and carried gleaming halberds (a combination of spear and battleaxe). The hangman was William Marwood, a cobbler from Lincolnshire, credited with devising the ‘long drop’, a method of hanging that broke the accused’s neck rather than risk slow strangulation. Like Pritchard, Chantrelle was dressed in the mourning clothes he wore at his wife’s funeral. He seemed cool and self-possessed as he mounted the scaffold but observers did note he looked haggard.

  There was little sympathy for Chantrelle but the prison chaplain, during a short service in the warden’s office, did ask God to ‘give strength unto him in this terrible hour … and let not the terrors of death fall upon him’. The terrors of death did not fall on him but he was looking pale as he walked from the warden’s office to the storeroom where the scaffold had been erected. There was a burly prison guard on either side of him and a procession of dignitaries and witnesses behind him. When he entered the room, he looked around at the cloth-covered boxes piled high all around and his nose twitched at the strong stench of oakum, a loose fibre twisted from old hemp ropes, the creation of which was a common form of employment for convicts. Then Chantrelle’s eyes fell on the trapdoor and, for the first time, he hesitated, perhaps only then feeling the chill breeze of his own mortality. The witnesses filed away to their vantage points as the prison officers led the pinioned prisoner to his place over the drop. Although he had been refused his champagne earlier, he did receive a small glass of whisky prior to the bolt being pulled. After Chantrelle drank his whisky, Marwood strapped his legs together with a leather belt, pulled a white cap over his head and then pulled the bolt.

  Marwood’s expertise was well employed that day for the Frenchman died without a struggle. Outside, a black flag was sent fluttering up the prison flagpole to inform the usual crowd on Calton Hill that the deed was done. The body hung under the level scaffold for about an hour before it was cut down and wrapped in cloth. He was buried, coated in quicklime, within the prison walls.

  Such was the interest in the case and his final hours that the Glasgow Evening Times published a special edition to give their readers a detailed account of the event.

  Chantrelle had the dubious honour of being the first person to be hanged in Calton Jail. He was not, however, the first person in Scotland to be executed in private instead of having to endure the public spectacle that the likes of Dr Pritchard went through. That particular honour went to tramp George Chalmers who was executed within the old County Prison at Perth in 1870 for the murder of toll-keeper John Miller in Braco.

  6

  SHADOW OF THE NOOSE

  Peter Queen

  The slender, sallow-faced man burst into the police office at 3 a.m. in the morning and made a quite astounding statement. ‘Go to 539 Dumbarton Road,’ he said. ‘I think you will find my wife dead there.’

  Even in the Glasgow of 1931 – razor-gang city where, if its reputation was to be believed, violence stalked the streets and death lurked at every corner – such claims were not made every night. But the police did not simply rush out into the November chill to see if there was indeed a body on the second floor of the specified tenement.

  The man certainly seemed nervous and not a little excited – just as you would expect. But, when he was asked what happened, he failed to answer. So he was asked again and then a third time. Finally he responded – and the words he used became the central plank in the case against him. For, if the police version of the sentence is correct, then the man may well have murdered the woman he claimed was his wife. But, if the man’s version was true, then he may well have been innocent of homicide.

  The expert witnesses employed by the defence would further complicate the matter. They were at the very top of their profession but even they could not agree whether there had been a murder at all.

  And in the centre of it all was a man standing in the shadow of the noose.

  * * *

  Chrissie Gall turned to drink as her shame over the lack of a marriage contract between herself and Peter Queen took hold. She had strong religious scruples and the fact that she and Peter, whom she loved dearly, were merely living in the guise of man and wife was too much for her to bear. The fear of her family discovering that she was living in sin drove her towards the bottle �
� and thoughts of suicide.

  But thirty-one-year-old Peter, the son of wealthy Glasgow bookmaker Thomas Queen, could not marry her. For he was already wedded to another although the marriage was over. Curiously, his first wife had also been an alcoholic. He had married her in 1918 but the marriage lasted just two years before her drinking habits forced her into a sanatorium. The heartbroken man, now known as ‘Poor Peter’ by friends and relatives, returned to live with his family.

  A certified nursemaid, Chrissie, four year younger than the man she loved, took up employment in the Queen household when she was around twenty years of age. However, this was no upstairs/downstairs affair for they did not become overly friendly until after she had left the job, eighteen months later. Her mother was seriously ill and she returned to the family home on Tollcross Road, in the east end of the city, to look after her shoemaker father, John. She and Peter kept in touch and romance, as they say, blossomed. Her father was a man of strict moral beliefs and, although he may have known his daughter was stepping out with the still-married Peter Queen, to his credit he did not force her to break it off. Chrissie had inherited some of his strict views but the heart wants what the heart wants and she continued to see Peter even though every nerve and sinew in her young body was screaming that it was wrong.

  When her mother died, Chrissie remained to tend to her father and the love affair with Peter continued. But, three years later, John Gall decided to move in with one of his other daughters and Chrissie found herself homeless. Peter rode to the rescue, renting her lodgings with tram conductor James Burns and his wife Fay in Hayburn Street, Partick. Three months later, at Christmas, Peter moved in with her. This was 1930 and a couple living together without benefit of clergy was, like a glimpse of stocking in olden days, looked on as something shocking. Cole Porter might have been telling the world that anything goes but he was a rich American writing in New York. This was a Glasgow still in the grip of sharp-faced Presbyterianism. Ashamed, Chrissie kept her situation from her family. She told them she was back in service, in a live-in position. To keep up the pretence she even visited her sister and father once a week on a Wednesday, pretending that it was her half-day off.

  But she had another secret that she kept from them. Chrissie had already shown a weakness for drink. Now her shame really began to take its toll on her delicate psyche and she used alcohol to blur the edges. But her strict moral upbringing was not to be washed away and, as she tried to drown her problems, they were learning to swim. Her drinking grew worse and Poor Peter must have wondered what he had done in a past life to merit the two women he loved becoming alcoholics.

  Everyone agreed he did everything he could to help Chrissie through her troubles. He was supportive, he was sympathetic and he never seemed to lose his temper. There were quarrels, of course, mostly when Chrissie was demanding money to buy drink. But, when it was suggested that he walk away from her, Peter quietly stated, ‘I will never give her up.’

  Chrissie, though, grew worse. When she was depressed, she drank and, when she drank, she got more depressed. And with the drinking and the depression came the threats of suicide.

  James Burns and his wife, in the thick of the drama, tried to help as much as they could. Fay Burns would hunt out the bottles Chrissie had hidden around the house and empty the contents down the sink. Each time, Chrissie promised meekly that she would stop drinking but, each time, she would break that promise. Sitting with Mrs Burns one day, drunk as usual, Chrissie suddenly leaped up and said she was going to ‘make a hole in the Clyde’ and dashed for the door. Her landlady hauled her back and calmed her down. Finally, she elicited a promise from the young woman that she would stop drinking. Chrissie managed to last a week before she came home rolling drunk yet again. A disappointed Mrs Burns upbraided her and Chrissie replied, ‘It’s all very well for you to speak that way but you don’t understand. Some day, you will come in and find me strung up.’

  Once Chrissie got up in the middle of the night and turned on the gas, ostensibly to boil a kettle, but did not light it. Then, drunk no doubt, she went to bed and left the gas hissing into the room. Had Mrs Burns not been awakened by the smell they could all have been killed. Whether this was a deliberate act or just a case of drunken absent-mindedness cannot be said but Peter did tell his friends the following day that he had been following her round all night switching off the gases.

  In August 1931, Peter and Chrissie moved into their own rooms at 539 Dumbarton Road. By now Mrs Burns’s sister, Helen Johnston, had got to know the couple and she had also tried to talk Chrissie into turning her back on the bottle. Chrissie promised and promised and promised but then her shame wagged its finger at her and she tried to still it with whisky and gin. And, as always, this led to depression and thoughts of death. She told Mrs Johnson that she’d take a double dose of medicine or that, one day, Peter would come home to find her hanging behind the door. But, the gas incident aside, they seemed to be merely threats – attempts at attention seeking perhaps – until the night she tried to hang herself.

  On Thursday 12 November, James and Fay Burns called in at the Dumbarton Road flat for a cup of tea. James Burns went to hang his coat up behind the door when he noticed the hook was broken. ‘Who’s been breaking up the happy home?” he asked.

  Peter Queen said Chrissie had tried to do herself in the night before. He had woken up in the middle of the night when he heard a noise. Later, in court, he outlined what he found. ‘I could see no one about. I got up then and lit the gas and saw Chrissie sagging against the door with a rope tied around her neck. I immediately caught her up and took the rope from her neck. When I got her straightened up, she fell against me very much dazed. I got her back into bed and got some water.’

  Chrissie told James and Fay Burns that she had been a damned fool. She knew the drinking was doing her harm and she was resolved to stop. And she did manage to stop – for two whole days. Around this time, James Burns’s brother-in-law Leonard Johnson spoke to her, pleading with her to change her ways and that, if she didn’t, it was going to kill her.

  ‘I know,’ she said, ‘but you don’t know the position I am in, having to maintain so much pretence. I am fed up with life. I have to tell lies everywhere I go. I cannot go home to my own people. Some day Peter will find me behind the door.’

  It was decided that she might benefit from a week’s holiday and Peter suggested Aberdeen. Chrissie was not too keen but she agreed, even arranging to take her ailing young niece with her. Peter thought that was a grand idea – looking after the youngster might take her mind off her problems – and arranged for lodgings. She was due to head north on Monday 23 November. But the much-needed vacation would never take place. For, within days of the decision being taken, Chrissie Gall was dead – and her loving ‘husband’ facing a capital murder charge.

  On Thursday 19 November, Chrissie went on a monumental drinking binge. She had visited her father to tell him about her impending trip to the Granite City and later she had met up with her brother, Robert, a grocer. Whisky and beer were consumed and then Chrissie said she had to be going as she was due to meet Peter at 5.15 p.m. Bert Gall went with her and together they were drawn into a nearby pub where, naturally, more spirits were duly quaffed. Armed with a bottle of whisky, they headed off to catch a bus across the city to Dumbarton Road, where the aromatic pleasures of another pub lured them inside. However, noticing her advanced state of intoxication, the barman refused to serve Chrissie. She and Bert left to weave their way to her flat. They arrived at around 9 p.m. to find a very anxious Peter Queen waiting for her. She told him she’d been at her sister’s house and he seemed satisfied with that – although he was worried about her condition. It had been raining and her feet were soaking wet so he helped her take off her shoes and told her to warm herself in front of the fire.

  Slowly, Chrissie’s mind began to clear and with her sobriety came the realisation that this was the first time she had taken a relative back to the flat. Her family still did no
t know she and Peter were living as man and wife and as far as she was concerned they must never know. But here was her brother Bert and the man she called husband sitting together in their love nest. She scribbled a note to Peter and slipped it to him, telling him to pretend this was his aunt’s flat. He quickly realised what she wanted him to do and he played his part to the full. He managed to get Bert out of the house and, as he was walking him to the tram stop, he said that Chrissie had a long way to get home and she should rest first. Bert seemed to accept it all without question. But he would never see his sister alive again.

  Mrs Johnson found Chrissie in the flat the following day – alone and completely drunk. She was sure that her little charade the night before had failed to convince her brother and she was terrified he would tell the rest of the family that she was living with Peter Queen. The worried Mrs Johnson sent word to Peter, who was working as a clerk for his father’s firm, saying that Chrissie was very ill and suggesting that he should come home in the early afternoon. It was also suggested that a doctor should be called but Peter could not get one to come that afternoon. He did, however, arrange for a home visit the following morning. Mrs Johnson returned later in the day with her husband and stayed for the rest of the evening. Chrissie had been asleep most of the time but did wake up at around 8.30 p.m. looking for a drink. She had to settle for some ginger ale and some hot water and sugar. Later she had tea and sandwiches before the Johnsons left at around 10.45 p.m.