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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION 'METICULOUSLY RESEARCHED ... A GLORIOUSLY ENGAGING ROMP' JANICE HALLETT, THE SUNDAY TIMES 'IMMERSIVE AND COMPELLING' DAVID KYNASTON 'A PAGE-TURNER' ROBERT LACEY 'CAREFUL AND COMPELLING' KATE MORGAN 'YOU WILL READ IT IN ONE SITTING' MARC MULHOLLAND 'A REAL-LIFE GOLDEN-AGE CRIME NOVEL' SEAN O'CONNOR A brilliant narrative investigation into the 1920s case that inspired Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham. On a bleak Tuesday morning in February 1921, 48-year-old Katharine Armstrong died in her bedroom on the first floor of an imposing Edwardian villa overlooking the rolling hills of the isolated borderlands between Wales and England. Within fifteen months of such a sad domestic tragedy, her husband, Herbert Rowse Armstrong, would be arrested, tried and hanged for poisoning her with arsenic, the only solicitor ever to be executed in England. Armstrong's story was retold again and again, decade after decade, in a thousand newspaper articles across the world, and may have also inspired the new breed of popular detective writers seeking to create a cunning criminal at the centre of their thrillers. With all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, the case is a near-perfect whodunnit. But who, in fact, did it? Was Armstrong really a murderer? One hundred years after the execution, Agatha-Award shortlisted Stephen Bates examines and retells the story of the case, evoking the period and atmosphere of the early 1920s, and questioning the fatal judgement.
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‘Immersive and compelling, The Poisonous Solicitor works at every level: as human drama, as an evocative slice of social and legal history, above all as a lucid and dispassionate presenting of the evidence about a century-old puzzle.’
David Kynaston, bestselling author and historian
‘Stephen Bates puts us in the middle of an extraordinary trial for murder, when one life and many reputations were at stake. It was gripping then and fascinating now, with a shocking sting in the tale. You will read it in one sitting.’
Marc Mulholland, author of The Murderer of Warren Street
‘Marital disharmony, spare arsenic in the house, a premature death, the suspicions of nosey neighbours – all leading to the judge putting on the “Black Cap”. Have you ever imagined you might find yourself sitting in judgement over a murder trial? Stephen Bates’ gripping narrative takes you right inside one of the classic court cases of the 20th century. His page-turner lays out all the evidence for you to examine, so you feel you are actually up there on the bench – presiding over the dramatic trial of the only solicitor ever to be hanged in England. Guilty or innocent? You decide ….’
Robert Lacey, bestselling historian and biographer
‘Part Agatha Christie, part social history, Stephen Bates has stripped one of the classic 20th-century murders of a hundred years of conjecture and supposition, revealing a dark and troubling parable of inter-war rural Britain, a suffocating world of professional rivalries, rigid social codes and deadly small-town gossip – where poisoned chocolates are delivered by first-class post. Finding nuance and ambiguity in what has often been viewed as a black-and-white case, The Poisonous Solicitor is a real-life golden age crime novel with a tragic heart and an unexpectedly poignant denouement.’
Sean O’Connor, author of Handsome Brute and The Fatal Passion of Alma Rattenbury
‘A careful and compelling reconstruction of one of the most infamous murder trials of the 20th century. Stephen Bates excels at contrasting the claustrophobia of small-town life with the grisly details which make the story still so notorious, a century on.’
Kate Morgan, author of Murder: The Biography ii
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For Alicevi
CONTENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Bates read Modern History at New College, Oxford, before working as a journalist for the BBC, The Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and the Guardian. He worked at the latter for 22 years as a political correspondent, European Affairs Editor in Brussels and religious and royal correspondent. A regular broadcaster, he has also written for a wide range of British and global newspapers and magazines. He is married with three adult children and lives in Kent. x
FOREWORD
The tale of Major Armstrong was a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic a century ago, in 1922. It was a life-or-death struggle played out in a country courtroom, a real-life tale of professional rivalries, gossip and poisoning in a small British market town, at a time when fictional murders in such settings were becoming bestsellers for authors such as Agatha Christie. Newspapers devoted tens of thousands of words to every twist and turn of the Armstrong story and they have returned to it periodically ever since. It has also been the subject of documentaries and at least one dramatic retelling, for the story, as contemporary writers such as Edgar Wallace knew, is extraordinarily dramatic and remains a real whodunit with many unanswered questions.
Since its notoriety in the 1920s however, there have been only two substantial retellings; one by the crime historian Robin Odell, called Exhumation of a Murder and published in 1975, which explicitly supported the police case that Armstrong was guilty: ‘a born loser … with his egotistical fantasies.’ The other, published twenty years later in 1995, was by Martin Beales, a solicitor who not only found himself working in the same office as the major, even occupying his desk and chair, but who also later moved into Armstrong’s former home. He reached the opposite conclusion to Odell, in his book Dead Not Buried, that the major was framed, did not receive a fair trial and should not have been executed. Both books are formidably professionally researched and I have drawn on them, but xiitheir diametrically opposed views demonstrate that mystery remains. Twenty-five years on, although all the cast are now long dead, there are still documents and archives to explore, experts and relatives to listen to and previously overlooked stories to recount, shedding new light on a sensational story from the not-so distant past.
Stephen Bates, Deal, August 2021
CHAPTER ONE
‘I’ll build a stairway to Paradise, With a new step every day.’
Lyrics by Ira Gershwin,a hit for the Paul Whiteman Band in 1922
On a bleak Tuesday morning in February 1921, a middle-aged woman named Katharine Armstrong died in her bedroom on the first floor of an imposing Edwardian villa overlooking the green fields and rolling hills of the isolated borderlands between Wales and England. Her last coherent words as she lay paralysed and terrified, five hours before her death, according to the nurse looking after her, were: ‘I am not going to die, am I, because I have everything to live for – my children and my husband.’
It was a sad end for a woman who was only 48 years old, apparently happily married and with three school-aged children, but no more remarkable, seemingly, or tragic than the recent deaths of hundreds of thousands of young men in the trenches of the First World War which had ended a little over two years earlier, or thousands more men, women and children who had died in the influenza pandemic which had followed. It was a tragedy only for her children and her husband, who had just gone to work, cadging a lift with the local doctor who had been treating her for gastritis, inflammation of the kidneys and possible heart problems – all manageable conditions – for the previous eighteen months or so. 2
Within three days she was buried in the local churchyard at Cusop, the hamlet just outside Hay-on-Wye where the couple lived, and where her husband Herbert was a long-established and well-liked solicitor, magistrates’ clerk, a churchwarden and a pillar of the local Freemasons’ lodge: the very definition of respectability.
‘The best and truest wife has gone to the Great Beyond and I am left without a partner and without a friend,’ he allegedly wailed to an acquaintance.1 But despite an obituary in the local Brecon and Radnor Express under the headline ‘A Popular Hay Lady’, there were few mourners: Herbert and the Chicks, as it said on the card attached to the family’s wreath; Dr Tom Hincks, the local GP and his wife; Mrs Griffiths and her son Trevor from the rival solicitors’ firm in the town and Emily Pearce, the Armstrongs’ housekeeper. Few other people in Hay paid much attention.
Yet, within fifteen months of such a sad domestic tragedy, Herbert Rowse Armstrong would be arrested, tried and hanged for her murder, the only solicitor ever to be executed in England, certainly in modern times. The domestic tragedy in a remote corner of the country became an international media sensation and a distraction from the world’s other news. The loving husband would become a villain of the age, one of the most notorious figures of the 1920s. A dapper, punctilious, little man with a waxed moustache who usually wore gilt-rimmed pince-nez spectacles, he would become more than a murderer at the centre of a case that the judge at his trial described in strangulated judicial syntax as ‘so deeply interesting that I doubt whether any of us have in recollection a case so remarkable’. He would, in fact, become an archetype: a member of the professional classes who had unaccountably turned bad and been caught out by a simple slip.
Armstrong was the cunning figure whose story was retold again and again, decade after decade, in a thousand Sunday newspaper articles in Britain, Australia and the United States, but also the 3basic model and maybe inspiration for the new breed of popular detective writers seeking to create a clever criminal at the centre of their thrillers. Authors such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Margery Allingham and Georgette Heyer, whose plots revolved around subtle murders, devious minds and ingenious solutions: the obscure but fatal clues that ensnared the killer who thought he’d got away with it.
Readers anxious to escape their own humdrum lives, as Herbert Armstrong could not, into a world where problems could be wished away and difficulties unravelled, were starting to buy such novels in large quantities. They could spot the clues and work out the mysteries for themselves, playing amateur detectives, according to the strict conventions of the genre. Christie’s first crime novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which introduced the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, was published in 1921 and Sayers’s first effort, Whose Body?, featuring her hero Lord Peter Wimsey, came out in 1923. Crime paid both for publishers – less so for novelists – and also for newspapers. Editors always knew that sensational murders with their precipitous cliff-hanging outcomes boosted circulation – would the accused hang within weeks or would they escape the noose?
As so often, George Orwell put it best in his essay, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, written in 1946. He pictures an ordinary chap between the wars, relaxing with the News of the World spread out on his lap after a heavy Sunday lunch: ‘roast beef and Yorkshire or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder…
‘What would be, from a News of the World reader’s point of view, the “perfect” murder? The murderer should be a little man 4of the professional class – a dentist or a solicitor, say – living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs and preferably in a semi-detached house … He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate … Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison … a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer.’
The recipe fits Armstrong to a T, indeed he gets a mention in the essay. Apart from some well-deployed red herrings, it must have been the case of the Hay-on-Wye Poisoner that Orwell was thinking about as he wrote. He was a fussy man of the professional class, a solicitor indeed, highly respectable, certainly voted Conservative and, though not a Nonconformist or an abstainer, was a regular churchgoer. And the tiny, unforeseeable detail was the little packet of arsenic he carried in his tweed gardening jacket.
Was he, though, a murderer? Precious few of the newspaper-reading public would have thought he was innocent in 1922 after they read the extensive and prejudicial coverage of his case. But many who knew him, in his own household, among the servants, his clients, the people of Hay-on-Wye, his close friends and the lawyers who represented him refused to believe he could be guilty. ‘He was a good master and a sympathetic friend,’ said his clerk Arthur Phillips. ‘That Armstrong who was hanged at Gloucester was not the Armstrong that we knew,’ said the bishop of Hereford, who had known him since they were at Cambridge together.2 Some of them indeed believed he had not got a fair trial and should never have been convicted, that maybe he was the sacrificial victim of another trial eighteen months earlier, which had had a very different outcome. But in 1922, there could be no reversal of fortune and there 5would be no reprieve. Mostly though, the world convicted him: after all, he had been subjected to a prolonged trial in the British legal system which everyone knew to be the best in the world. He himself would have thought so.
Hay-on-Wye sits so exactly on the border between Wales and England, at the confluence of the River Wye and the Dulas Brook, that the town is half in Wales, while Cusop, the hamlet where the Armstrongs lived half a mile down the road, is in England. For centuries it was disputed land, the scene of periodic skirmishes and battles and it remains presided over by an ancient castle. Sitting roughly halfway between Hereford, Brecon and Builth Wells and surrounded by the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains to the south and the Radnor Forest and the Cambrian Mountains to the north, by Hay Bluff and the picturesquely named Lord Hereford’s Knob, Hay then as now was at the centre of an agricultural area. In the early 1920s the outlying farms and villages operated much as their inhabitants had for centuries, living in remote and ancient farmhouses, well off the beaten track. They drew their water from ground springs and their lighting from candles and hurricane lamps. Electricity would not reach the Golden Valley south of Hay for another 40 years.3 There were few telephones, even in towns, though the Armstrongs had one at home. Cattle and sheep were driven down the valleys and through the streets of Hay on market days, and there was a slaughterhouse owned by a local butcher right in the centre, directly opposite the castle. Horses brought down from outlying farms in the hills were led to the local railway station for transportation to the coalmines in south Wales for an underground life as pit ponies.
Home to about 2,000 people, as it still is today, the town was so situated between the hills as to be ‘pleasantly lending itself to 6gossip and the observation of other people’s affairs’, wrote Alexander Filson Young in his account of the trial in the 1920s.4 Long before the international book festival, which now brings 80,000 visitors to the town for a fortnight each spring to hear best-selling novelists, television personalities and former American presidents, Hay was off the beaten track. Indeed the surrounding area was literally so, as some of the local farms in the foothills of the Beacons were not connected to even gravelled roads and could only be reached on foot or by horseback. Such visitors who came were either staying for the fishing, or passing through on the way to somewhere else. The Wye Valley Times in September 1919 spoke of a Land of Afternoon: ‘Crowds in the real sense do not exist here. If the entire population of visitors in all the miles between Chepstow and … Plynlimon were to be seized and deported to a great seaside resort their arrival would hardly be noticed.
‘Great grey chars-a-bancs from Glamorganshire coast towns do not linger. The atmosphere of the Wye is unattractive to motorists of every class – a little too drowsy and besides there is nowhere for them to stay. The whole Wye valley does not contain a single large modern hotel. The Wye still belongs to the 19th century. It is always afternoon here – Sunday afternoon. This is a happy hunting ground for those who still impel that late Victorian instrument: the “push bike”.’5
The Welsh border was in a part of the country where the 1920s were not yet roaring – nor would they ever do so. It was not a society of the fast set, of weekend country house parties, or of louche and bohemian values. There might have been village dances, and tennis and bridge parties, but ‘jass’ as played on wind-up gramophones would have been frowned upon by respectable folk. As for modern dancing, the Charleston and the Black Bottom had yet to be invented and would not reach the Wye Valley for years. It is to be doubted that Modernism, the arts movement of Picasso and 7Matisse, of Le Corbusier and Ezra Pound, had reached the Golden Valley except perhaps to be laughed at in philistine magazines such as Punch.
Katharine Armstrong played the piano well at Mayfield, the family’s villa in Cusop, until nephritis seized up her fingers, but ragtime would not have been her scene. Did people in Hay who could afford a gramophone play the latest jazz shellac records? ‘My Man’ was the biggest hit of 1922 in America, France, Italy and Britain and its lyrics certainly give a flavour of the attitudes of the time:
He’s not much for looks
He’s no hero out of books
But I love him, yes I love him
Two or three girls has he
That he likes as well as me
But I love him
I don’t know why I should
He isn’t true
He beats me too
What can I do
Oh, my man I love him so
He’ll never know
All my life is just despair
But I don’t care …
Or was it Al Jolson, or the Paul Whiteman Orchestra playing ‘I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise’ that wheezed and whistled out of the gramophone horns in the sitting rooms and parlours and through the open windows on a summer’s evening? Did local residents attend the tin fleapit on the outskirts of town which housed a cinema, and if so were their eyes being opened to a world beyond the valley, where Tom Mix fought Red Indians – as they would have 8called them – Douglas Fairbanks fought the Sheriff of Nottingham, Charlie Chaplin saved The Kid and Rudolph Valentino smouldered seductively in The Sheik? It may be doubtful whether the very respectable Armstrongs would have gone.
For Hay’s was a conservative society where a hostess might – and Katharine Armstrong did – take exception to a guest turning up to a tea party in casual flannels and not wearing a tie. Divorces might have been on the rise in metropolises like London, but were still frowned upon in little places like Hay and any such carrying on would incur social isolation, exile, exclusion and disdain.* In any case, divorce was expensive, required the hiring of lawyers, subterfuge in producing evidence of adultery or desertion – even if really there had been none – and hearings in court. It was not for the likes of church-going folk. Debt was also a social stain, as was not paying your dues on time and in full. Herbert Armstrong, clerk to the magistrates of Hay in Brecknockshire, Clyro in Radnorshire, just across the river, and Bredwardine in Herefordshire, and also clerk to the local tax commissioners would have had a lot to lose in a divorce. He would not, however, as the magistrates’ clerk, have been busy with cases of serious crime beyond poaching, drunkenness and the occasional Saturday night affray.
The Great War still cast its grim shadow. The jobs and homes fit for heroes that the politicians had promised voters had not materialised or were unaffordable. Many sons had not returned, or had returned maimed, and often those who had come back unscathed were no longer prepared to accept the futures that their families had previously mapped out for them. They had seen the outside world and were returning with new ideas. Deaths were a regular, even 9expected occurrence for all ages: flu and tuberculosis, whooping cough and scarlet fever would carry off the young as well as the old in those pre-antibiotic days. Widows and mothers wore black and the creased mourning ties of fathers and brothers grew greasy and faded with constant use.
Pubs would not unlock their doors on Sundays and generally did not offer food, but the chapels and churches certainly were open, and their ministers and clergy would want to know why any backsliders had stayed in bed. The Welsh Church Act of 1914, disestablishing the Anglican Church of Wales and ending its privileged status after decades of agitation and Parliamentary effort, had only come into effect after the end of the war in 1920. But it was still controversial around Hay, where some parishes chose to remain within the established orbit of the diocese of Hereford. Nonconformism was still benefitting from the Great Revival of 1904–5, which had seen the working classes sublimating their frustrations and flooding to newly-built chapels across the country, but disillusionment in the wake of the war was beginning to set in. It was a prim, stultifying and sanctimonious society.
This could only be exacerbated by the post-war and post-pandemic economic depression of 1920–21. Although immediately after the end of the war in 1919 there was a boom in investment, this soon receded as prices and economic output fell: gross domestic product reduced precipitously by 22 per cent between August 1920 and May 1921 and unemployment increased to 17 per cent as men returning from the war and demobbed failed to find the work they had anticipated. There were complex reasons for this, including industrial unrest culminating in a miners’ strike, and also the Government’s determination to return to the gold standard at pre-war levels, but the clearest effect felt in rural areas such as Hay-on-Wye was the decline in land prices which prompted estate sales. Landowners, many of whom had lost heirs in the war, were 10seeking to sell up and realise what profit they could. It was one of these sales that would prove to be the prime cause of dissention between Armstrong and his rival solicitor in the town.6
Few people in Hay had cars – the doctor was one and the new solicitor in town was another – but if the Armstrongs needed to drive anywhere, bowling along at a top speed of twenty miles an hour, they had to borrow or rent one. For those who wanted to escape the social conservatism and conformity there was indeed the push bike and the railway, which ran in those days along the valley and stopped at Hay, opening up a route to Hereford, Worcester and the wide world of Birmingham, with its jobs and prospects.
Outside events, at least for now, rarely impinged on Hay-on-Wye except economically and occasionally politically. Lloyd George’s wartime coalition with the Conservatives was slowly breaking down in rancour and disagreement. The prime minister, who was keeping his wife in Wales and his young mistress in London, was accused of selling honours to supporters, and the Liberal Party was splitting into factions between his followers and those still loyal to Asquith, the man he had supplanted as prime minister in 1916. The Tories were aching to claim power, and the Labour Party would soon become the second party. Westminster may have been distant from the Herefordshire border county, but there were six elections locally in as many years between 1918 and 1924, all returning Conservative or Unionist candidates.
In the big world, despite the First World War, the British Empire was still at its zenith in 1921, reaching its furthest extent with a quarter of the world’s population owing at least nominal allegiance to the King-Emperor George V. The Royal House of Windsor had survived the war, helped by an astute change of name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, as several similar institutions around the world had not, but cracks in the imperial dream were beginning to show. 11
In December 1921, the Anglo-Irish Treaty had been agreed between the British government and a separatist Republican delegation from Dublin, a further cause of dissension within the coalition. This ended the previous three-year-long war of independence following the suppression of the 1916 Easter Rising. The treaty made provision for the establishment of the Irish Free State as a dominion of the Empire, but without the six Protestant-dominated counties of Ulster. The agreement was bitterly contested in the Irish Parliament, the Dáil, in early January 1922, and within months resulted in the outbreak of a vicious civil war throughout the southern counties. That summer, the Anglo-Irish field marshal Sir Henry Wilson would be gunned down in his full uniform by two IRA men outside his home in Eaton Square as he returned from unveiling a war memorial at Liverpool Street Station. ‘You cowardly swine!’ he was alleged to have shouted as he attempted to draw his sword.
Cracks in the Empire were also beginning to appear in India, the Jewel of the King’s crown, though they were as yet small. The Amritsar massacre of 1919 had stirred nationalist unrest, and in March 1922 a little-known and absurd figure, at least to British audiences, called Mohandas Gandhi would be arrested in Bombay (now Mumbai) and would be sentenced to six years imprisonment for sedition.
By the end of the year, the Ottoman Empire would be abolished, Smyrna would be torched and the Greek monarchy would fall, leading to the flight of the royal family, including a toddler called Philippos, rescued from Corfu with his parents and sisters by the British Navy. In Rome, Benito Mussolini and his fascist cohorts would come to power, while in Moscow Joseph Stalin was quietly manoeuvring his way to becoming general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. In Germany, the Deutsche Mark which had been valued at twelve to the dollar in 1919 fell to 563 marks in June and 7,000 by December, as hyperinflation took a grip. The United States’ 12Republican president Warren Harding, a former newspaper editor from Ohio, made the first speech broadcast by radio from the White House. He was a man who enjoyed late-night poker games, whisky – despite Prohibition – and his mistress. And he would also watch bemused as the administration’s secretary of the interior was caught accepting bribes from companies wanting to tap into oil reserves owned by the US Navy at Teapot Dome in Wyoming. That May the Lincoln Memorial would finally be dedicated.
In Britain, the first regular wireless broadcasting transmissions would get under way too, with Radio 2MT broadcasting from an army hut in Essex from February followed by Radio 2LO coming from a studio at Marconi House on the Strand in London from May. The British Broadcasting Company, the first appearance of the organisation that would become the BBC, followed later in the year.
1922 would be the year when Frederick Banting in Canada harnessed insulin to treat diabetes; when Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Picasso, Proust, Joyce, Satie and Clive Bell met for the only time and dined at the Majestic Hotel in Paris; when T.S. Eliot published ‘The Waste Land’, Jean Cocteau wrote his version of Antigone and when Howard Carter first broke into Tutankhamun’s tomb. It was the year when Vegemite was invented and Paul Scofield, Doris Day, Judy Garland, Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, Jack Kerouac, Charles M. Schulz, Lucian Freud, Yitzhak Rabin, Julius Nyerere and Pierre Cardin were born. And Ernest Shackleton, Alexander Graham Bell, Lord Northcliffe and Proust died.
Such events, great and small, close and far distant, would probably have had little interest to the honest folk of Hay-on-Wye, even if they had known much about them when the news finally arrived in the papers. But the arrest of one of their leading citizens, in his office in the middle of the town, on New Year’s Eve 1921, on unknown but clearly serious charges, certainly lent itself to gossip. 13They crowded round to find out more. Soon the town would be the focus of national and then international attention. As the Charlotte Observer in far off North Carolina noted in a syndicated column shared with newspapers across America from Atlanta to Edmonton that spring: ‘The greatest poison drama of the century has this tiny country village as a background … All England is thrilled by the trial of a modern Borgia.’714
* The number of divorces in England and Wales rose from 1,654 in 1919 to 3,522 in 1921 as marriages broke up in the wake of the war. (The Long Weekend, page 61.)
CHAPTER TWO
‘What can I say except that the mystery seems to deepen every day?’
Harold Greenwood
The Armstrong story really starts eighteen months before Katharine’s death, and 70 miles deeper into Wales, on an ordinary summer weekend in the small Carmarthenshire town of Kidwelly. Sunday 15th June 1919, seven months after the end of the First World War, was a quiet day for the Greenwood family. It was a hot morning and so, while solicitor Harold Greenwood tinkered with his car, his wife Mabel and the couple’s eldest daughter, 21-year-old Irene, sat in the garden reading. There was nothing to indicate that it was to be Mrs Greenwood’s last day alive. Nor that what was about to happen would not only shatter the family but would also have a direct impact on events a few months later in Hay-on-Wye.8
Harold and Mabel, who were both in their mid-forties, had lived in Kidwelly, near the south-west Wales coast, for more than twenty years. Mrs Greenwood was a pillar of the local parish church and was well-liked locally for her good works, visiting the sick, supporting the local tennis and croquet clubs, being generous with her time and money and helping around St Mary’s Church, which she attended every Sunday. Not on this day though, for she did not feel 16completely well. She was in frail health generally, had a weak heart, experienced fainting fits and was perhaps that summer suffering from depression as well. Some of her friends thought so, others claimed not to have noticed anything amiss in her demeanour.
Her husband Harold was much less well-liked locally. Originally from Yorkshire, he was a solicitor in the nearby town of Llanelli, though his practice, specialising in property conveyancing, was neither particularly successful nor busy. It operated out of a glum little side-street office. The laid-back rhythm of his days, starting late and finishing early, was punctuated by lunches with his friend W.B. Jones, the co-owner of the local paper, the Llanelli Mercury. He had played his part in Kidwelly affairs – previously captaining the local cricket team – but he was regarded with suspicion, as a bit of a stirrer. Perhaps he was too bumptious, too brusque and too given to suggestive remarks, to ‘carrying on’ in the gossip of the time. He was thought to be over-friendly to women, perhaps standing too close for comfort, allegedly once seen with a woman who was not his wife sitting on his lap. Such alleged conduct was enough to promote private censure among the church- and chapel-goers of the little town. Dressed in country squire tweeds and gaiters, watch-chain draped across his waistcoat, with a patrician air and a bristly moustache, he had few male friends locally either.
What was probably less appreciated by the couple’s acquaintances was that the money in the family came largely from Mabel’s side. She was a Bowater – daughter of the founder of the successful paper-manufacturing company – and her private means of about £700–900 a year sustained the family’s lifestyle and ensured they could live in a big house with servants.
The couple had bought Rumsey House, a large Victorian Italianate villa, one of the most imposing properties in the middle of Kidwelly, three years earlier and, to all intents and purposes, were a loving and affluent couple, with four children. They had 17four servants: a cook, a between-stairs maid, a parlour maid and a gardener to keep the lawn and flower beds overlooking the River Gwendraeth in good order. Harold and Mabel enjoyed strolling round the paths, admiring the view out towards Carmarthen Bay.
Harold had bought a large can of Cooper’s Weedicide in 1917, and two cans of Eureka weedkiller in February 1919, and more again in April, each time openly and signing the chemist’s poison book as the law required. It was intended to keep the dandelions under control. Like most such products, Eureka was 60 per cent arsenic, a white powdered poison, dissolvable in water and tasteless if ingested.
Four members of the family had breakfasted at 10am: eggs, bread and butter and coffee and then they all settled down for a leisurely morning while Margaret Morris, the cook, prepared lunch. There would be a leg of lamb, vegetables and a gooseberry tart for dessert. Hannah Williams, the eighteen-year-old parlour maid, laid the table, putting out a bottle of Beaune, purchased the day before and quaintly labelled ‘Pure Red Wine of Burgundy Character’ for Mabel. Her husband would drink whisky with the meal, and the children water. Later in the morning Hannah said she saw Mr Greenwood disappearing into the china pantry next to the kitchen, which was aggravating because she wanted to get the plates out for lunch, but did not want to disturb him. She thought he stayed there for half an hour, though he would say later that it had been no more than ten minutes. He may have been washing his hands in the pantry sink after his morning working on the car. Or lacing the red wine.
The gong sounded for lunch at 1pm and the family trooped in: Harold and Mabel, Irene and ten-year-old Kenneth, who was delicate and educated at home; the couple’s two teenaged children, seventeen-year-old Eileen and fifteen-year-old Ivor were away at boarding school.
Quite why gooseberry tart was served was unclear, since Mabel Greenwood said afterwards it always disagreed with her, but the 18meal passed off well enough. During the course of it, one of Mabel’s church friends, Florence Phillips, called by and was invited back for supper. She said she thought Mabel looked pale and pinch-faced, not at all well. But afterwards Mabel walked in the garden with Irene, then went upstairs for a lie down. Later she came down again and sat in a deckchair, wrote a couple of letters and read a book. Meanwhile a family friend, Tom Foy, the manager of a local cinema, called round to take Irene out for a driving lesson in the family car. As they left, Mrs Greenwood spoke to him, but he could not hear what she said over the rattle of the engine. He thought she looked quite well, and that she seemed pleased that they were going out.
Later in the afternoon Mrs Greenwood gradually became increasingly unwell, telling her husband that she was suffering from diarrhoea and a pain near her heart. She had some tea however, and when in early evening she complained that she now felt sick and had palpitations, Harold gave her a glass of brandy to buck her up, which promptly made her vomit. He and Irene helped her upstairs to her bedroom, and then Harold trotted across the road to fetch old Dr Thomas Griffiths, who had been the family’s physician all the time they had lived locally, and was a friend. He examined the patient – by now it was about 7pm – found that she was still vomiting, and said she should be given a few more sips of brandy diluted with soda water and put to bed.
While Mabel was getting back into bed – and vomiting again – Dr Griffiths and Harold wandered downstairs and out into the garden to play a few games of clock golf in the evening air. When he returned home, Griffths sent over a bottle of his own bismuth medicine to calm Mabel’s stomach. He was not unduly worried about her.
But during the course of the evening Mabel got much worse. Miss Phillips arrived for supper only to be greeted with the news 19that she was very ill, and so she went back into town and found the local district nurse, Elizabeth Lewis Jones, who also knew the family and came at once. The assumption was that Mabel’s heart was playing up, or the skins of the gooseberries in the tart had disagreed with her.
Nurse Jones arrived at 8pm to find Mabel deteriorating suddenly, cold to touch and collapsing in her room. She gave the patient another dose of the doctor’s medicine before leaving to return home and put her own child to bed. When she came back Mabel was no better, dozing but still diarrhoeic, and the nurse suggested that Harold should fetch Griffiths back again at once. Even though the doctor’s house was just across the road, Harold was away so long, maybe an hour, that Irene eventually followed him and brought the doctor back herself. Her father had apparently been chatting to the doctor’s sister Mary. Again, Harold would later insist he had only been gone for ten minutes.
By midnight Mabel seemed to be sinking and Harold went to fetch the doctor yet again. He returned saying he could not rouse him, whereupon the nurse went across, knocked perhaps more determinedly, and brought the doctor straight back. Neither Harold nor Griffiths seemed overly concerned. Nurse Jones would later claim that Harold had to be asked to get the doctor every time that evening, and that his concern seemed to amount periodically to asking his wife how she felt. ‘Very bad,’ she answered when she was able to speak. Stoically, she apologised to the nurse for the trouble and sent Irene off to bed. Miss Phillips also left, with Harold telling her he had often seen his wife much worse and she would be fine by the morning. Dr Griffiths saw Harold taking a breather outside the house and asked how his wife was: ‘Easier,’ Harold replied.
By 1am Mabel seemed to accept that her condition was serious and possibly terminal. She asked the nurse if she was dying, and said she wished she could live to bring up her children. She could be 20heard praying to herself. During one of his visits – maybe at 10pm as he claimed, or 1am as the nurse insisted – Griffiths prescribed some tablets, though he was later confused as to what exactly they were. He told the inquest ten months later that he had given her two morphia tablets – which would certainly have killed her – but later changed his mind and said they were opium pills – which would have contained a fortieth of the morphia dose, and so should only have alleviated her pain. Shortly afterwards Mabel relapsed into a coma. She did not wake up again, and within two hours she was dead.
Dr Griffiths certified the cause of death as heart disease, and four days later Mabel was buried in the churchyard. The suddenness of her death caused some local comment. The Reverend D. Ambrose Jones, the vicar, who had seen Mabel on the Saturday at a meeting of the tennis club, was astonished when an upset Nurse Jones brought him the news of her demise that Monday morning. They seem even at that early stage to have discussed whether she had been done away with and there were mutterings about the need for a post-mortem.
But there the matter might have rested – no one was formally suggesting a further investigation of Mabel’s death – except for the fact that Harold himself seemed to give every reason for the gossip to intensify by his behaviour. He told Mabel’s sister at the funeral that the doctor had been so good, coming over every half hour, but later he would insist that the pills Griffiths had prescribed had been too strong and that they had killed his wife: ‘If she had not had the pills, she would be all right today.’ He believed that they had been morphia tablets.
Much worse for the God-fearing folk of Kidwelly who had been devoted to his wife, Harold soon seemed to be courting not one but two possible replacements for her. In fact, his name was being associated by the gossips with half the eligible spinsters in the village, but he appeared to have settled on two. The first was Dr Griffiths’s 21middle-aged sister, Mary, with whom he had been chatting on the evening of Mabel’s death, and the second was 31-year-old Gladys Jones, fourteen years his junior, the daughter of his friend, the part-owner of the Llanelli Mercury. He had known both women for years, Gladys from her childhood, and he borrowed money from her on the morning after his wife’s death. Gladys even accompanied him to buy his mourning clothes for the funeral.
The scandal deepened into outrage when it became known that he had proposed to both ladies in turn, within a few weeks, before marrying Gladys and jilting Mary, three months after Mabel had died. A stunned Mary apparently retired to bed, ‘howling’ according to Harold, when she discovered that he was about to marry someone else. Irene Greenwood had initially been given her mother’s wedding ring by her father, but he then asked for it back so he could give it to Gladys instead. Understandably, Irene moved out and went to live with Bowater relatives in London. She too was surprised to be told by letter about her father’s impending marriage, two days before it happened.
The Carmarthenshire Lothario’s insouciance shocked the entire community, as did Nurse Jones’ repeated suggestions around the village that there should have been a post-mortem. The rumour spread that Mabel’s death had been deeply suspicious and that she must have been poisoned. Greenwood was soon making threats to sue the slanderers.
But no sooner had Harold and Gladys returned from their honeymoon that October than the local police were calling at Harold’s office to speak to him. At first he could not find Mabel’s death certificate in his safe, but he produced it when they made a return visit. Police Superintendent Samuel Jones told him that they would have to apply for an exhumation order as part of their investigation, to which Harold cheerily replied: ‘Just the very thing. I am quite agreeable.’ 22
Nevertheless, it took the police a further six months to act on the rumours, having convinced the coroner that there was a case to answer ‘either in the interests of justice or, if that should happily not be so, then to relieve the husband of a terrible suspicion which will otherwise probably cling to him for life’. Harold by then had already endured local suspicions from Mabel’s friends, the community and from members of his own family for nine months.
Mabel’s body was duly dug up on 16th April 1920 and was indeed found to contain arsenic, though not in a huge quantity: about a quarter of a grain. It would not have killed a fit person, but perhaps might have incapacitated someone already suffering from heart problems. The finding was certified by Sir William Willcox, the leading contemporary toxicology specialist in London.
Greenwood was still acting blithely, insisting that he had slept ‘damn well’ on the night of his wife’s exhumation. He spoke to the South Wales Daily Post claiming – which was true – to be the victim of village gossip and scandal because he had married so quickly after Mabel’s death. In fact he was voluble to any journalist who came to see him, telling the Llanelli and County Guardian in April 1920 that it was all a tissue of lies: ‘I want the whole thing cleared up and I have no doubt at all what the result will be.’
His was an aggressive counter-attack: what today might be called a proactive public relations strategy. He spoke to the Daily Mail twice, which can only have served to increase national and international press interest. The second Mail interview on 12th June, just before the inquest, in which he seemed to blame his wife somewhat for her own death, was a classic of the genre, lacking only the colour of the curtains at Rumsey House to make the vivid tale complete. His quotations were a construct of popular journalism, knitting his thoughts together seamlessly: ‘What can I say except that the mystery seems to deepen every day? It is said that they have found arsenic in the body. That I cannot understand. I should 23not have been in the least surprised to know that they found poison of some kind for during the last two years of her life my wife took many kinds of medicine … My first wife had been ill for upwards of two years. She was wasting away and she knew it.’
The inquest in Kidwelly’s town hall concluded on 16th June 1920, exactly a year after Mabel’s death and the thirteen local jurors needed only an hour to return a verdict that the death of Mabel Greenwood had been caused by acute arsenical poisoning, administered by Harold Greenwood. He was accordingly arrested at home even before the verdict was pronounced. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, for he had not attended the inquest. Wearing his tweeds and plus fours, he was bundled into a police car to be taken to Llanelli. According to the police, he was ‘concerned but not agitated’ as he was taken into the police station to the accompanying sound of boos from the crowd milling around outside. There was more heckling from the crowd in July when he was committed by Llanelli magistrates to the next Carmarthen assizes* to be held in November. Meanwhile he was held in the county prison within the town’s ancient castle walls.
To many local people it seemed an open-and-shut case: an unpopular local lawyer had brazenly killed his well-liked wife to enable him to marry a younger woman. If there was arsenic in Mabel’s body, Harold must have poisoned her. Since arsenic was quick acting, she must have been poisoned during the Sunday lunch, but was it injected into the gooseberry tart, or into her glass of Beaune? That must be why he had disappeared for so long into the china pantry shortly before lunch. Suspicion centred on the red wine because it seemed that only Mabel had drunk any at lunch. 24The rest of the bottle had subsequently disappeared. That Mabel had not exhibited all the familiar symptoms of arsenic poisoning and that she had swallowed Dr Griffiths’s bismuth tablets, which themselves would have included traces of arsenic, as well as his prescribed morphia pills, seemed unimportant to both local residents and the police. The investigation was notably sloppy: although Rumsey House was searched without finding any poison apart from the weedkiller, Irene Greenwood, one of the four people at the Sunday lunch, was never questioned.
The details of the long-drawn-out affair were irresistible to the press and even American newspapers took an interest in the middle-class poisoning-and-adultery murder. There were three murder cases before the assizes that autumn, but only Harold Greenwood’s attracted national interest. Applications for press tickets flooded in – the uncomfortably narrow benches of the small court would be crowded to suffocation – and the Daily Mail even hired an aeroplane to fly photographic plates taken by their photographer outside the court to be developed in the air on the way back to Fleet Street each day.
Late-autumn Carmarthen had never seen such activity: every hotel room for miles around was booked, and the chief prosecuting barrister, Sir Edward Marlay Samson, had to board with a local family. The streets were crowded with onlookers and the lawyers were treated as visiting celebrities when they made their way to court each day.
This was not surprising, as Harold Greenwood had secured the services of the most famous defence lawyer in the country, Sir Edward Marshall Hall, whose reputation for securing acquittals in even the most hopeless-seeming cases had made him a celebrity well beyond the law courts. Tall and imposing, handsome and theatrical, with a mesmerising and resonant voice, Marshall Hall had been engaged in many of the most notorious murder trials of the 25previous twenty years. In an era when sensational trials and their daily reports filled newspapers, and were the sole source of news about them, ‘Marshall’ was a star. With him in court, journalists could expect hugely quotable copy, ingenious defences and even the probability that he would save his client from the gallows.
He had just successfully defended a teacher named Ronald Light, who had been accused of shooting a teenaged girl, Bella Wright, whom he had befriended while they were cycling in the country lanes of Leicestershire one sunny Saturday afternoon the previous summer. It had been a case that had seemed so clear-cut – a service revolver of the sort Light had retained after the war, like many former officers, had fired the fatal shot, and the distinctive green bicycle that the killer had been riding was identical to his. Light had even admitted cycling with Bella on the day in question and acknowledged that he had thrown the bicycle and his revolver in a canal after reading about the girl’s death.
But Marshall Hall’s defence had appeared both ingenious and brilliant. He had argued that Bella Wright might have been accidentally killed by men out shooting at crows in nearby fields. Light had proved an exemplary witness in his own defence, admitting that he had met Bella but insisting that they had parted company a few minutes before she must have been killed. In the end the jury believed him and his impassioned defence barrister and had acquitted Light. The judge had afterwards written to tell Marshall Hall that his defence of Light had been without a fault. It was only 90 years later that it was revealed that after his acquittal, when he could not be tried twice, Light had privately admitted to the police that he had indeed killed the girl, though he claimed that he had shot her accidentally as he showed off his gun. Instead of being hanged in 1920, he lived until 1975.
Greenwood’s case would be Marshall Hall’s third murder defence of the year and it too seemed to be a hopeless one, so 26much so that a London silversmith who he visited before going down to west Wales had promised to give him the 18th-century tankard he had been examining if he secured another acquittal. ‘The man’s innocent and I’ll get him off – you’ll see,’ Marshall Hall had told him.
No wonder the great barrister was followed through the streets of Carmarthen as he limped into court each day. His legs were inflamed from phlebitis and the stress of yet another murder trial far from London made him short-tempered, overbearing and crotchety with both the judge and the witnesses. Marshall Hall knew exactly what he was doing, behaving like a West End star touring the provinces. He might well have been in pain, but his exhibition, interrupting, bullying and shouting, was probably thrilling to those packing into the small courtroom. Certainly the judge, Mr Justice Shearman, preferred to try to appease and mollify the great man, and the prosecuting counsel, Samson, a Welsh barrister, seemed equally flustered.
It is easy to forget long after the abolition of the death penalty what a strain conducting such trials was, particularly for defence barristers who knew only too clearly that one misstep, one ill-judged question, or one maladroit answer from their client could plunge them inexorably to their doom within the month. A trial is always a whodunit, but in the days before the abolition of capital punishment it was one with the possibility of imminent execution.
In the circumstances of his ill health, Marshall Hall’s defence of Harold Greenwood was legally, if not necessarily morally, a tour-deforce. He zeroed in on the evidence of the family’s teenaged parlour maid Hannah Williams, who was more used to speaking Welsh than English. Every inconsistency in her evidence about the events eighteen months earlier was remorselessly picked over by the grand gentleman from London, who was eventually admonished by the judge for shouting at her. Mr Justice Shearman: ‘I have to see that 27the witnesses are not addressed in a vehement way.’ Marshall Hall: ‘Why not?’ Shearman: ‘Because it confuses them.’ Marshall Hall: ‘It is my duty to be vehement.’
He also had a field day with the hapless Dr Griffiths, who decided that when he had told the inquest in June that he had given Mabel morphia tablets, he now really meant they had been opium ones. Unfortunately, or possibly fortuitously, the doctor had destroyed his prescription book following his retirement at the end of the previous year and so it was impossible to say conclusively what he had actually prescribed to his patient on the night she died. Marshall Hall, having surreptitiously visited the Kidwelly chemist’s shop and purchased two identical bottles, one containing bismuth and one arsenic, both white powders, flourished them dramatically in court the next day, to the consternation of the judge, and suggested that Griffiths might have confused the two chemicals in his surgery.
Marshall Hall was uncertain about calling Harold Greenwood as a witness. He knew how easily a poor performance could determine an accused man’s fate. He had had previous experience of that in defending the poisoner Frederick Seddon, who had used arsenic on an aggravating lodger in order to inherit her money, in his trial at the Old Bailey eight years earlier. Seddon had been a man so glib, cocksure and calculating that he had given himself away under cross-examination. Greenwood’s legal team feared that he might do the same, and so Marshall Hall asked him only a few questions: ‘Had you anything to do with your wife’s death?’ ‘Nothing whatever’; before handing him over to Samson, who was unable to make any headway or obtain an admission of guilt.
As the gas lamps dimly illuminated the court on the fifth afternoon of the trial, a Saturday, the defence team produced their star witness, Irene, the third adult at the fatal lunch. She was now 22 and, whatever differences she had had with her father – whom she 28repeatedly and poignantly called Daddy in giving her evidence – she proved decisively effective. Yes, she said, she too had drunk a glass of Burgundy with her meal, and she had also had a glass later in the evening. No one had asked her about it before. That meant the collapse of the prosecution case, which had asserted that the wine must have been poisoned as only Mabel had drunk any of it. As the judge, Mr Justice Shearman, said at the very end of the darkening evening, so that his words were left ringing in the jury’s ears over the weekend: if Greenwood had not poisoned the wine ‘then there is an end of the case’.
On the following Monday morning it was the time for Marshall Hall to give one of his characteristically barn-storming final speeches. He was one of the last of the Victorian defenders, gesticulating, imitating, shouting and supplicating in a style which Dickens’s Serjeant Buzfuz might have recognised. It was a technique that was rapidly being supplanted even then by the quieter, less rhetorical style of younger barristers. But it was thrillingly effective to watch.
Beginning with a dramatic apology for being unwell, like an actor-manager clawing the curtain at the end of a draining performance – ‘it is probable that after making my speech I will have to leave the court’ – he proceeded to launch into a three-hour long peroration. At the end he performed his familiar trick in such cases, stretching his arms wide as if they were the scales of justice to weigh the jury’s decision over the life of the man in the dock, at which point, the trial transcript says, ‘the accused bowed his head to his knees and was not visible in the dock for some moments’. Then, to emphasise that there was no turning back from their decision, he quoted from Othello’s speech before murdering Desdemona: ‘“If I quench thee, though flaming minister,/ I can again thy former light restore/ Should I repent me. But once put out thy light./… I know not where is that Promethean heat,/ That can thy light relume.” Are you by your verdict 29going to put out that light? Gentlemen of the jury, I demand at your hands the life and liberty of Harold Greenwood!’
By comparison, Sir Edward Marlay Samson’s quietly reasoned closing speech for the prosecution could not compete. Marshall Hall had left by then, but he had swung the court and was standing on Cardiff railway station platform in the evening twilight waiting for the train back to London when a porter approached and told him that Greenwood had been acquitted.
The verdict was actually not quite as decisive as it appeared. The jury added a rider to their decision: ‘We are satisfied on the evidence in this case that a dangerous dose of arsenic was administered to Mabel Greenwood on Sunday 15th June 1919 but we are not satisfied that this was the immediate cause of death. The evidence before us is insufficient and does not conclusively satisfy us as to how and by whom the arsenic was administered.’9 In other words, it was what would in Scotland have been a ‘not proven’ verdict – but that was not available to a Welsh or English court. The judge refused the prosecution’s application to have the rider made public, and so Greenwood was able to walk out of court and down the steps a free man and without any imputation against him.
It had been one of Marshall Hall’s greatest defence performances, but Greenwood did not bother to thank him for it and indeed refused to pay his admittedly hefty retainer for the last day of the trial: perhaps not surprisingly since it was 50 guineas a day: 300 guineas so far plus an initial 300 guineas to secure his services, almost as much as Mabel’s annual Bowater allowance would have been. Harold Greenwood was, according to Marshall Hall’s biographer, Edward Marjoribanks, the only client never to thank him. In due course, however, he would receive the gift of the silver tankard from his silversmith friend.10
In a sombre week of remembrance – the trial finished two days before the unveiling of the Cenotaph in London and the burial of 30the unknown soldier at Westminster Abbey – one couple at least had cause for relief. Harold Greenwood may have been acquitted in court but he was not declared innocent in the court of Kidwelly opinion. He and Gladys soon moved away over the English border to a village in Herefordshire, where he changed his name to Pilkington. But Harold Greenwood was a broken and impoverished man, the stuffing knocked out of him. He died eight years later, aged 54. Rumsey House remained vacant for some years before being sold to the Wesleyan Methodists for a chapel; its garden in which Harold and Mabel had strolled that Sunday by then overgrown and rundown. It still is a Nonconformist chapel now, known these days as Capel Sui, its past association with a sensational murder trial long forgotten.
But the Greenwood case was not forgotten eighteen months later, when Herbert Rowse Armstrong was arrested. Here was another small-town rural solicitor who had apparently murdered his wife using arsenic distilled from weedkiller. There was too much of that sort of thing going on and it had to be stopped. Armstrong was said to have been fascinated by the Greenwood case, chatting about it the following day during a train journey from Hay to Cheltenham on his way to visit his sick wife at Barnwood hospital, with another local acquaintance called May Lilwall, though whether it gave him ideas or not is another matter.11 For the prosecuting authorities, particularly the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin, there was an altogether different lesson: if there was another similar investigation, the police would have to be much more thorough and not leave anything to chance.
*
