The Man who Would be Sherlock Read online

On 23 October 1903, George Edalji was convicted at Staffordshire Quarter Assizes of the crime of cattle mutilation. The jury took only forty-eight minutes to reach its verdict. Three minutes later, the assistant chairman of the sessions, who presided at the trial, returned from the room where he and his four colleagues had gone to give ‘full and due’ deliberation to their sentence. ‘You have been found guilty of this very serious charge, and as we think, very properly,’ he told Edalji, who stood facing him at attention between two warders:

  Now we have to consider what punishment to award you. On the one hand, we take fully into consideration your position and what this means to you; on the other hand, we have to consider the state of the county of Stafford and the neighbourhood of Great Wyrley, and the disgrace which has been inflicted on us and that neighbourhood by the condition of things.

  ‘Your sentence is penal servitude for seven years,’ he then informed the prisoner.

  On hearing this, Edalji shuddered slightly, raised his eyes to the ceiling, and said nothing. It was reported that he had nodded respectfully to the bench as he was then led out to begin his sentence, which was served first at Lewes and then at Portland prison.

  In the days ahead, several newspapers would go on to speculate about Edalji’s lack of outward emotion on learning his fate. According to the Birmingham Gazette, it was all a case of oriental inscrutability – or ‘a vain mind couched in mystery’ – while to the comparative religion experts at the Lichfield Mercury the prisoner at the bar had simply gone into a ‘typically Hindoo hypnotic trance’ on hearing the news. It was left to the Daily Mail to add the anthropometric detail that Edalji was plainly a ‘degenerate of the worst type. The shape of his jaw and mouth are those of a man of very debased life.’

  __________

  2 Collins was one of a number of Crimes Club members to come to an untimely end. In September 1908, he was found drowned in a ditch near Lowestoft, Suffolk, possibly a suicide. He was 60.

  3 There is some doubt about whether the police had mounted a specific watch on the vicarage that night, or merely assigned men to the local area. Captain Anson later testified, ‘It was found impossible, owing to the nature of the surroundings, to make absolutely certain that no one could come in or out of the house without being observed.’ Conan Doyle, by contrast, wrote of the case, ‘The outside of the vicarage was watched by constables … By the police evidence there were no less than twenty men scattered about waiting for the offender.’

  5

  ‘YOU NEVER FORGET THE FIRST NICK OF THE RAZOR’

  Investigative journalists, historians and at least one world-renowned contemporary novelist have all focused on the flawed nature of the evidence presented against George Edalji at his trial. There is no absolute proof of any conspiratorial intent – whether involving the police, the prosecution, the Home Office, or what’s broadly termed ‘the Establishment’ – but there are certainly signs of what Doyle called ‘extraordinary conduct’ and ‘stupidity’ by the various authorities. That there was a rush to judgement is obvious to any unbiased observer; arrested on the same morning as the maiming occurred, Edalji was already serving his lengthy sentence for the crime nine weeks later. Many critical witnesses were overlooked, many paths were not explored and alternative suspects not pursued, and glaring discrepancies in the physical evidence either missed or deliberately ignored.

  Those responsible for these decisions would say the right man was nonetheless convicted. Yet the irony of the hurried investigation and ensuing verdict against Edalji is that they allowed the case to rumble on for years to come, with Conan Doyle leading the charge for the defence. It’s clear that he felt a strong personal engagement with the accused, who aroused not only his professional interest but also the very real sympathy he characteristically reserved for the underdog. While some of his reasoning may seem slower, and his forensic abilities less refined, than those of the icily logical Sherlock Holmes, in the end Doyle proved to be the superior mind of the two.

  On 8 September 1903, Edalji had returned to Cannock Police Court for his committal hearing on the charge of wounding a horse. Even this relatively routine procedure provided one of those flashes of sudden insight or recognition beloved of fictional crime dramas. According to the Wolverhampton Star:

  Edalji came up fresh and cheerful from a night in the police cells, and walked briskly into court. He was greeted affectionately by his father, the Vicar of Great Wyrley, and also by his mother.

  The prisoner’s favourite attitude, leaning back with arms folded and legs crossed, revealed very plainly the curious wearing down of the heels of his boots, which forms an important link in the chain of evidence against him …

  A constable named Cooper described the curious footprints found near the wounded horse and [leading] towards the vicarage. The heel-marks, he said, were noticeably broad and very short. He took the left boot of the pair obtained from the vicarage – identical to those now worn by Edalji in court – and made impressions in the mud next to the footprints. The two sets of impressions corresponded exactly in size, shape and in the heel peculiarity.

  Under cross-examination, Constable Cooper acknowledged that a number of people had walked randomly around the crime scene before he had been able to make his impressions in the mud there, but that nonetheless he remained confident of his findings. There had then been some discussion of the anonymous letters, which were not part of the criminal complaint, apparently in order to establish an atmosphere of moral turpitude around the Edaljis.

  Inspector Campbell took the stand to describe a visit to the Great Wyrley vicarage, during which the defendant had seemed to him ‘more interested in the malicious communications than would appear natural for any purely innocent young man’. Since George had by then been on the receiving end of the hate mail for fifteen years, on and off, it might be argued that for him not to have been curious about it would have been the stranger reaction. At that stage, the prosecution introduced its star witness – one Thomas Gurrin, the same Treasury handwriting expert whose courtroom evidence in 1896 had helped convict the innocent Adolf Beck of allegedly swindling a series of women out of their valuables. Unabashed, Gurrin now testified that a number of the anonymous letters he had examined in this case ‘show the same peculiarities as those which the police had received in Edalji’s own script. [He] was of the opinion they were written by the same hand.’

  At the conclusion of the prosecution case, Edalji had risen from his table, said simply, ‘I am perfectly innocent and prefer to reserve my defence’, and then sat down again.

  Of the subsequent trial it’s perhaps enough to say that the prosecution skilfully rehearsed its theories about the state of the defendant’s coat, trousers and boots as they appeared on the morning of 18 August; again raised the matter of his wet razors, allegedly freshly wiped clean of blood; and revisited the long history of the poison letters. Conan Doyle would not be the only one to later wonder whether it was proper under English evidence law for Edalji’s presumed role in the mail-writing campaign to be used to help convict him of the maiming, which was the sole offence he was tried for.

  The prosecuting counsel neatly pre-empted the argument that the defendant had been in custody at the time of the assault on the Greens’ horse, and thus was innocent of all other such offences. Edalji was merely the lynchpin of a gang of ruthless conspirators ‘go[ing] about the countryside looking for prey’, the court heard, although, when asked, Captain Anson couldn’t immediately say when, if ever, the police might make further arrests in the case.

  Edalji’s defence, it has to be said, lacked some of the polish and self-assurance of the prosecution side. There was a spirited rebuttal of the bloodstain evidence, and the accused, called to the box, vehemently denied any knowledge of the maiming or of the anonymous letters. But no mention was made of Edalji’s poor eyesight, which Doyle, the former oculist, would insist rendered him unfit to commit the crime he was accused of.

  In later testimony, the jury was asked w
hat possible motive the young lawyer might have had for periodically abandoning his ‘irreproachable and scholarly’ attitude to life for that of the homicidal fiend. It was a valid point. The defence’s frequent references to the corruptibility of the police were, however, perhaps counter-productive. There might well be ‘occasional excesses and individual lapses’, the Star admitted, but in 1903 public confidence in the British judicial system, and in uniformed authority as a whole, remained high among all classes of society. It would be at least another generation before the catastrophic shock of the Great War began to undermine some of the certainties of the age.

  However procedurally diligent they may have been, and notwithstanding Doyle’s later tribute to their ‘most amicable, refined and accomplished chairman’, it has also to be said that the Stafford Quarterly Assizes were not ideally suited to the challenge of trying George Edalji. The small downstairs courtroom, more used to serving as a forum for disputes involving matters of poaching or petty rural theft, rapidly took on some of the characteristics of a particularly animated county fair combined with those of a circus sideshow. A large crowd of would-be spectators gathered each morning outside the front door, and to service them street vendors marched briskly to and fro bearing trays of refreshments. Early on the first day a scuffle broke out, and two otherwise ‘reputable individuals attire[d] in bicycling garb’ plunged through a plate-glass window in a debate about their respective positions in the queue which had formed on the courthouse steps.

  Meanwhile, local opinion appeared divided on the specifics of the case. One middle-aged lady arrived wearing a straw hat customised with a slogan indicating how positively she would respond to George Edalji’s acquittal, while others in the crowd shouted, ‘Lock him up!’ and its coarser variants. It all had the makings of a first-class tabloid celebrity frenzy, so far as one could ever be said to have existed in the typical English provincial market town of 1903.

  In fact, there is a mass of evidence from contemporary newspapers and other accounts of the trial that the great majority of local people, not only those who crowded around the assizes, but ordinary residents as well, believed that Edalji, either acting alone or as part of a conspiracy, was guilty as charged. It could hardly have been otherwise. The maimings were still fresh in everyone’s memory, and many of those jostling for admission to the courtroom had personally witnessed the gory crime scene. It was not difficult for them to imagine the peculiar-looking young Asian committing the outrage for some obscure reason presumably rooted in the sadistic traditions of the East. The folk tales of the murderous Thuggee gangs active for centuries in India, and the more recent history of terrorist attacks on British officials there, gave substance to the popular belief that the ‘Hindoo’ was intrinsically more predisposed to maniacal and savage acts of violence than the white man.

  Even so, Edalji received at least a passably fair hearing within the constraints of the law. The presiding judge, Sir Reginald Hardy, had by then had a long and distinguished legal career spanning nearly thirty years. Born in 1848 (a direct descendant of the vice admiral of ‘Kiss me, Hardy’ fame), he’d taken a first-class degree at Oxford before qualifying as a barrister at London’s Inner Temple. After marrying Lucy Gladstone, the prime minister’s niece, Hardy had been lucky enough to successively hold office as the High Sherriff of Staffordshire, a JP, and more recently as presiding magistrate of the quarterly sessions. He was also a church warden, a charity commissioner, and a lieutenant colonel of his county’s yeomanry.

  With a few rare exceptions, he’s agreed to have been knowledgeable and personally unassuming – in other words, exactly the sort of conscientious public servant and imperial conservative Conan Doyle might normally have warmed to. In one popular account of the Edalji case, Hardy is depicted as a ‘legal lightweight’ whose control of the trial alternated between incompetence and flagrant prejudice against the defendant. This is not quite fair. When, for instance, the prosecution came to quote Edalji’s remark that he had been ‘expecting [his arrest] for some time’, Hardy was at pains to point out that this was more consistent with innocence than guilt. Regarding a possible motive for the crime, he made the eminently sane assertion that, ‘We may never know why some offences occur’. Just as there was such a thing as the inexplicable suicide, he added, so there was the unaccountable need of a ‘small but dangerous few’ to inflict harm on others.

  When the time came for his summing-up, Hardy told the jury that there had been failures on the part of the police to protect the crime scene, or to properly use the footprint evidence that resulted, and that they were to carefully consider whether or not the handwriting expert had been entirely convincing. On retiring, they would be provided with writing samples to compare for themselves, as well as with detailed maps of the Great Wyrley area. There were other remarks that seemed to favour the prosecution case, too, but taken as a whole this was not the summation of a ‘red-faced old county buffoon sputtering bile against the accused’ as he’s been called. It’s true that Hardy and his colleagues took only minutes to consider Edalji’s fate once the guilty verdict against him had been returned. It’s also true that their sentence of seven years, while not lenient, was just half the maximum total allowed by law.

  There was an immediate and sustained, if not universal, campaign which presented Edalji as the victim of an appalling miscarriage of justice, and demanded that he be given a pardon. An early advocate was the maverick figure of 58-year-old Roger Dawson-Yelverton (hereafter ‘Yelverton’), a Welsh-born former deputy judge of the West London Courts and Chief Justice of the Bahamas, and now – following his removal from the latter post for malpractice – a colourful if not always professionally successful barrister. Yelverton’s specialty was the wrongly convicted, for whom he perhaps felt an affinity; his own dismissal from the bench drove him into ‘ill-paid exile, drink, despondency and a belief in the occult’, it’s been said.

  He was soon able to organise a petition for Edalji’s freedom, which attracted more than 10,000 signatures. The Times reported that an ‘impressively high percentage [were] those of eminent jurists’. Yelverton in time presented this document to the Home Secretary, who from December 1905 was none other than Herbert Gladstone, son of the late premier and thus a cousin by marriage of Edalji’s trial judge. Senior civil servants reviewed the case, but concluded that there were no compelling grounds for exercising the royal prerogative, which remained the only available means of a pardon prior to the establishment of a unified Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907.

  Among other things, Yelverton pointed out that there had been at least three further animal maimings carried out following Edalji’s conviction, ‘but that in each case, every injury is said by the police to be accidental and attributable to barbed wire or some concealed danger’. Meanwhile, the London barrister Sir George Lewis, a more orthodox champion of seemingly lost causes (and the model for Sir Robert Morton in Terence Rattigan’s play The Winslow Boy) also wrote to the Home Secretary protesting Edalji’s innocence.

  One of the case’s most engaging moments came when Lewis and Gladstone later found themselves discussing the matter over a glass of mulled wine while dressed respectively as the prophet Moses and an Egyptian pharaoh, as gold-painted servants fanned them with large feathers, during the course of Lewis’s annual Christmas costume ball at his home in London’s Portland Place. Even this singular line of attack failed to secure Edalji’s release. The barrister and Liberal MP Robert More also made representations in the case, but these broke down following More’s unexpected death in November 1903 at the age of 67.

  Early in 1904, Charlotte Edalji sat down to send a letter to some 300 of Britain’s leading public figures. She told those among them who had already expressed their misgivings about George’s conviction, ‘My husband, daughter, and I are deeply grateful to hear that you are kindly enquiring into the matter of what we feel to be a cruel, and unjust sentence on one who is innocent.’ (There was no mention of the views of the Edaljis’ younger son
Horace on his brother’s imprisonment.) George was ‘thoroughly fond of his profession’, she continued:

  I am an English woman, and I feel that there is among many people a prejudice against those who are not English, and I cannot help feeling that it is owing to that prejudice that my boy has been falsely accused.

  Mrs Edalji concluded by asking that the letter’s recipients ‘help us with your influence, and that our son may be restored to us soon’. Although the family’s heartfelt appeal went out to a ‘very wide section of the great people in England … concerned with the structure and fate of society … and informed or wishing to become informed about grave matters of justice’, there is no evidence that Doyle himself received a copy.

  Meanwhile, the subject of this plea would go on to serve just less than three years of his seven-year sentence. Edalji spent his first ten months of confinement at the Victorian red-brick Lewes Jail, which he later agreed was ‘not pleasant’. In August 1904, he was transferred to Portland, off the Dorset coast, although unlike Adolf Beck before him he was at least spared the worst horrors of the local rock quarry. Instead, possibly as a sardonic commentary on his crime, Edalji was engaged for ten hours a day patching up feeding bags for horses, before eventually being assigned ‘light duties’ which mainly consisted of picking threads of coir fibre out of a large pile and passing these to a fellow inmate to sew into doormats. At some stage it was discovered that Edalji’s eyesight was poor, and as a result he slept in a medical ward at night.

  During his time in custody it also emerged that he had left behind certain debts in civilian life, including an unpaid bill of £340 (£22,000 today) from a London stockbroker. The magazine Outlook would speculate that Edalji had undergone a sort of metamorphosis, something like that in a modern-day werewolf film, in order to commit his crimes. Had this ‘seemingly innocuous [and] blinking little man’ become ‘for a few hours paganised and returned to the Orient?’ they wondered. Set against this was a series of barnstorming editorials starting in early 1905 in the weekly Truth, the National Enquirer of its day, which not so much defended Edalji as roundly attacked the police and trial proceedings.