Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books, Legal, Literature, Scotland

Book Review: Conan Doyle For The Defence

SCOTLAND: TRUE CRIME

Fox

Conan Doyle For The Defence by Margalit Fox

Intro: How the creator of Sherlock Holmes unravelled a real murder and deeply troubling miscarriage of justice

ON JANUARY 25, 1925, a prisoner was released from Peterhead jail. Concealed beneath his dentures, so the prison authorities could not find it, was an urgent note from a fellow convict.

It included a message for one of the most famous men in the world – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.

Oscar Slater, the man who sent the message, had already spent 16 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.

In 1908, an 82-year-old spinster, Marion Gilchrist, was living in a large flat in a prosperous neighbourhood of Glasgow. On the evening of December that year, her maid popped out to buy a newspaper. She was gone for just 15 minutes, but when she returned she found her mistress bludgeoned to death.

“Miss Gilchrist,” reports Margalit Fox in this gripping account of the murder and its aftermath, “had been beaten so savagely that autopsy photographs depict a face that looks as though it had never been human.”

Oscar Slater, whose real name was Oscar Leschziner, was born in Germany in 1872. He had lived in New York, London, Paris and Brussels as well as Glasgow. He moved in a dodgy underworld of chancers and semi-criminals, but he had no record of violence.

There was not a single link between him and Miss Gilchrist. Almost certainly, he had never heard of her before he was accused of killing her.

Unfortunately, the police were looking for a suspect. In Slater – a gambler, a foreigner, a Jew and a less than solid citizen – they found an ideal candidate.

His pawning of a brooch similar to one stolen from Miss Gilchrist brought him to their attention. It was not Miss Gilchrist’s brooch but this scarcely mattered. The police wanted him found guilty. In what Conan Doyle later called “a disgraceful frameup”, they made sure he would be.

Witnesses had seen a man leaving the scene of the murder.

In an identity parade, dark-haired, olive-skinned Slater was placed among 11 pale, pink Scotsmen. As a journalist later wrote, it was “like attempting to conceal a bull-dog among ladies’ poodles”. Unsurprisingly, the witnesses picked out Slater.

All evidence in Slater’s favour was either ignored or suppressed. At his trial, the judge gave a summing-up that was outrageously biased against him.

He was found guilty and sentenced to death. He had always been fascinated by machinery, but Slater surprised his warders by taking an interest in the gallows that was being constructed to hang him.

However, he was not to become too intimately acquainted with it – his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

In the words of a writer at the time, he was “held to be too guilty to be released, yet not guilty enough to be hanged”.

It was at this point that Conan Doyle became involved. With his big build and walrus moustache, he looked more Dr Watson than Holmes. But, Conan Doyle had a track record for reversing miscarriages of justice. Using observation and logic like his world-famous creation, he had already cleared the name of George Edalji in as bizarre a case as any Holmes had faced.

 

AN ANGLO-Indian solicitor living in the Midlands, he had been convicted of a series of animal maimings. Conan Doyle demonstrated that the man could not have been responsible.

Conan Doyle’s first efforts for Slater were unsuccessful and the convicted man continued to suffer in prison for years. Margalit Fox quotes extensively from his moving letters to his family back in Germany, which show he was very far from the unfeeling monster that had been described in court.

When Conan Doyle received the tiny note from the dentures in 1925 (it still exists in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow), he was inspired to try again. Times had changed, and Slater had so obviously been the victim of official dishonesty and incompetence that finally, after 18 years inside, the work of Conan Doyle and other supporters had its reward.

Slater was released from Peterhead prison on November 14, 1927. The rest of the story is not always a happy one.

Conan Doyle and Slater, who only met once face-to-face, fell out over money.

Slater was granted compensation of £6,000.

Conan Doyle thought he was honoured-bound to reimburse some of his supporters’ expenses. But Slater didn’t. The two men never communicated again.

And after 20 years of freedom, Oscar Slater died at his home in Ayr in 1948.

Nobody knows for certain who killed Marion Gilchrist. The only certainty is that it wasn’t Oscar Slater, who suffered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in Scottish legal history.

Margalit Fox’s engrossing book brings his case back to vivid life and highlights the part played in it by the creator of the world’s most famous detective.

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Arts, Books, Britain, First World War

Biographical Book Review: Reverend Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy

WOODBINE WILLIE

Selfless: The Reverend Studdert Kennedy

Intro: The Army chaplain who handed out almost a million cigarettes as WWI troops lay dying

AMID the carnage of the trenches, the Reverend Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, offered spiritual and practical succour to injured and dying troops.

And at a time when an estimated 96 per cent of soldiers smoked, one of the ways the clergyman helped them was to hand out cigarettes.

The British Army chaplain’s generosity in giving Woodbine to men on the front line to boost morale earned him the sobriquet of “Woodbine Willie”.

Official records also show that he regularly ventured – unarmed – into No Man’s Land, often under heavy machine gun and artillery fire, to give dying troops one last cigarette.

Clutching his Bible for protection, the “Battlefield Saint” would whisper the Lord’s Prayer and hold their hands until the end.

Reverend Kennedy’s selfless bravery during the First World War, particularly at the Battle of Messines, earned him a Military Cross.

Now his biographer has calculated that he spent most of his wartime wages handing out nearly one million cigarettes to Allied troops, returning home virtually penniless.

Dr Linda Parker said he sacrificed his family’s financial future to safeguard the emotional wellbeing of the men in his care.

“Studdert Kennedy was one of the First World War’s true heroes – a courageous and selfless Christian who gave away everything he had for the benefit of others,” she said.

“With the exception of his family’s annual living expenses, he spent the rest of his salary – his family’s entire income, really – on the men he took under his spiritual wing. He did, in almost complete certainty, spend virtually everything he owned. He filled his backpack with Woodbines, Bibles and a great deal of love.”

Book Cover: A Seeker After Truths by Dr Linda Parker

Troops were issued with two ounces of cheap rolling tobacco with their rations, but supply was irregular. Woodbines, which were strong and unfiltered, were not widely available on the Western Front and were like gold dust in the trenches.

Dr Parker – the author of A Seeker After Truths: The Life and Times of G A Studdert Kennedy (‘Woodbine Willie’) 1883–1929 – estimates he gave away 864,980 cigarettes at his own expense. She reached the figure by calculating the total number of men Studdert Kennedy is likely to have met between December 1915 and September 1918, the smoking rate among troops at the time, and his propensity to offer one or more cigarettes to “every man he met”.

She believes that over the course of nearly three years, he spent the equivalent of £43,249 in today’s money – every spare penny of his Army’s salary. This is based on a packet of five Woodbines costing 1d, which equals 25p today. His grandson, the Reverend Canon Andrew Studdert-Kennedy, team rector in Marlborough, Wiltshire, and an honorary chaplain to the Queen, agrees with Dr Parker’s findings.

“Anecdotes about my grandfather’s generosity are part of the annals,” he said. “My grandmother allegedly came home one day to find him dragging their mattress downstairs to give to someone in need, and another time he gave his coat away.

“I’ve no doubt whatsoever that he did everything within his financial means to help those men on the front line.”

Before the war, Studdert Kennedy served as a vicar in a poor parish in Worcester. When war was declared against Germany he enlisted as a temporary chaplain.

In December 1915, he was stationed at a railway station in Rouen, France, where he held communion with the troops, wrote letters for the illiterate, and prayed with young soldiers. When they left for the front line, he gave them copies of the New Testament and, to the 96 per cent of soldiers who smoked, one or more Woodbines.

News of Studdert Kennedy’s kindness and generosity spread, and by early 1916 he was known as “Woodbine Willie”.

His fame spread further when he was sent to the trenches of the Somme, Ypres and Messines. He routinely prayed with dying soldiers and was awarded the Military Cross after running through “murderous machine gun fire” at Messines Bridge to deliver morphine to men screaming in agony in No Man’s Land. He was gassed at the Battle of the Canal du Nord in 1918 and sent home on sick leave.

After the Great War, Studdert Kennedy became a pacifist, social reformer, author and poet. He was also made personal chaplain to King George V. When he died in 1929 aged 45, ex-servicemen sent a wreath with a packet of Woodbines at the centre to his funeral in Worcester.

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Arts, Books, China, History

Book Review: Blood Letters

REVIEW

Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao.

ON THE outskirts of Suzhou, near Shanghai, there’s a tomb in a cemetery that has a surveillance camera trained on it, keeping a perpetual eye on visitors.

Once a year, on the anniversary of the deceased, plain-clothes policemen arrive to block access to the tomb and to rough up any persistent pilgrims.

It’s the tomb of a remarkable woman called Lin Zhao, who was shot by firing squad at the age of 35 in 1968, at the height of the Mao regime.

“In death even more than in life,” writes the author of this important and significant biography, “Lin Zhao has become a nemesis of the Communist state.”

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A letter of protest that Lin wrote from her prison cell to the editor of the People’s Daily newspaper, never sent and long-suppressed, appeared on the internet in China in 2004.

It caused a sensation and became a manifesto for dissent in China that applies to this very day. Because it’s incendiary and remains a live story some of it can’t yet be told.

All of Lin’s interrogation records, which document the endless hours of questioning, probably conducted under duress and torture, are still filed away as part of the “criminal evidence” in her case.

Lin was an inveterate protestor and letter-writer. Astonishingly, the letters she wrote to her mother from prison, though they were confiscated at the time and not sent, were saved and eventually returned to the family.

Those letters were not written in ink, but in blood. As a punishment for he refusal to comply with the rules of the brutal Shanghai Municipal Prison, where she was incarcerated for being an “impatient counter-revolutionary”, Lin was deprived of ink. That was not going to stop her.

 

SHE had grasped the evils and depravities of Mao’s regime and refused to keep silent. In her cold, damp and freezing cell, she pricked her thumbs, dripped the blood into a small plastic spoon and wrote to her mother with a bamboo pick, a hair clip or the plastic handle of her toothbrush sharpened against the concrete floor, sometimes on a strip of bedsheet, rather than paper.

“Alas, Mama, they have communised China into a country of beggars.” She continued: “When the morning light of freedom shines upon the vast land of this country, we shall pour out our hearts to each other.”

But that yearned-for moment of reunion never came.

To make us appreciate Lin’s bravery and courage, Lian Xi, who has pieced together her life story, reminds us just how rare it was during Mao’s reign for anyone to dare to speak out. Lin was “the rare one who stood upright in an era when the entire country prostrated themselves”.

It was so much easier to keep quiet and go along with it all – and so much safer for the rest of the family.

There was a Chinese scholar in the prison, a once-renowned Yale Shakespeare expert, who submitted to copying and learning by heart reams and reams of Mao’s Little Red Book. He did so in order to earn remission points. Lin refused to do any such thing. When we’re most angry, it’s often because we’re angry with ourselves – and, reading between the lines, it’s clear that Lin’s fury was directed partly at herself. As a student in the early 1950s, she had fallen head-over-heals in love with Communism – to such an extent that she referred to Chairman Mao as “Dear Father” and reported her own father to the Government for illegally listening to an American radio programme.

“A revolution is not a dinner party,” Chairman Mao declared. “It is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Landlords were made to wear tall paper hats and paraded through the streets, denounced by jeering crowds.

Lin, at first, thought this a necessary stage towards the birth of a fairer society.

Then Mao pulled a really dirty trick. He announced a movement with the slogan: “Let a hundred flowers bloom.” Students were encouraged to voice their feelings about the less nice aspects of his regime, which many did, including Lin.

It turned out to be a ploy to “enforce the snakes out of their lairs”. All who had dared to voice protests were labelled “Rightists”. Many were sent off to exile for years of “redemption through labour” in the frozen north.

Lin managed to evade that exile; but her brief, passionate love affair with a student called Gan Cui was brutally cut off when he was banished to work on a construction battalion seven days’ journey away – an exile that would last for 20 years. The two never saw each other again.

Lin was arrested in 1960 for her contribution to an underground magazine in which she’d written a poem calling Mao’s regime “the Fascist rule of a centralised state” and ridiculing his Great Leap Forward as “a Great Leap Backward”.

On hearing of his daughter’s arrest, Lin’s father committed suicide by taking rat poison. “His darkest fear about where Lin Zhao’s adolescent pursuit of communism might lead her was realised.”

A simple and efficient method of torture was used as a matter of course in Chinese prisons: handcuffs, and not one pair but two, the upper and lower arms cuffed together behind the back. At one point, after causing trouble, Lin was put into double handcuffs for six-and-a-half months.

With no public trial or defence lawyer, she was sentenced to 20 years. Cajoled and tortured to confess, she refused.

 

MOST other inmates were soon begging for a chance to confess, so as to have an easier life. Not Lin, even though she was ill with recurring and worsening tuberculosis.

Out of handcuffs, she took five months to compose a long letter to the People’s Daily. “Mao must be the first to bear responsibility for the tragedy of our land swarming with famished refugees and the corpses of the starved filling up the valleys,” she wrote.

She predicted the course of the regime’s escalating orgy of violence brought on by Mao’s 1966 exhortation to smash “the four olds: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting class”.

She kept the prison guards in a state of perpetual exasperation with her shouting, her ranting and her refusal to comply.

Her cheerful spirit was never crushed: she sketched her favourite Disney characters (Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse) on a flattened toothpaste tube using a small nail. From October 1967, she was writing one blood-inked protest per day to the prison authorities.

The Military Control Committee authorised the death sentence, pronouncing her “truly a diehard, unrepentant counter-revolutionary”. Her Christian faith kept her going, to the end. “Let me turn over all my pains, hopes and dreams to my Lord,” she wrote.

Forced to wear a “monkey king cap” – a rubber hood placed over her face with slits for the eyes – she was taken out to the prison’s execution ground and shot.

The next morning, officials arrived at her mother’s door to deliver the news – and to demand a 5-cent “bullet fee”, as her daughter had “wasted a people’s bullet”. Mao’s officials knew just how to inflict the highest degree of pain on bereaved families of the condemned.

They, though, are now forgotten, while Lin Zhao is remembered; revered for her refusal to be silent in the face of Mao’s inhumane and appalling regime. This book is a worthy and credible tribute to her.

– Blood Letters by Lian Xi is published by Basic Books for £25

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