Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (18 page)

The jury were out for an hour and twenty minutes, long enough to suggest that they had heeded the Lord justiceClerk’s advice that they should go over the reports of the postmortem examination, and of the chemical analysis of the sheet and nightgown. Their foreman, an Edinburgh surveyor, announced, `the jury unanimously find the panel guilty of murder as Libelled.’ The time taken and the unanimity (majority verdicts have always been permissible in Scotland) indicated clearly enough that they had had no serious doubts about convicting a man on circumstantial evidence. Their position almost certainly was that, on the evidence led, no other explanation could account for Lizzie’s death. It is unlikely that, even if it had been possible for Chantrelle to have gone into the witness box, he could have led them to believe otherwise. He would have made a disastrous witness: glib, cocksure, ready with the evasive or irrelevant reply, he reeked of untrustworthiness.

The Lord justice-Clerk passed sentence. Chantrelle was to be hanged on 31 May. Hardly had he stopped speaking when Chantrelle indicated that he wished to make a statement. What he said was extraordinary enough. He completely ceded the Defence theory of gas-poisoning. It had never perhaps seemed adequate to him; now, having had leisure to think, he saw it could serve no further purpose. Away with it therefore. Instead, after some palaver and compliments to the jury on their close attention, he said:

`I am willing to admit that the dark stains on the sheet and on the nightgown - and allow me to say that I am speaking not so much in my own interest (a man has only one life and I have sacrificed mine) - but I am speaking in the interest of public morality and public safety; and I say I am willing to admit that these stains on the sheet and on the nightgown contained sufficient evidence that opium was there. I go further: I say opium was there; I am satisfied that opium was there. I am satisfied, further, gentlemen, that I did not put it there; that it did not proceed from Madame Chantrelle’s stomach; that it was rubbed in by some person for a purpose I do not know. I know my word goes for nothing. I don’t wish it to go for anything. My reasons for saying this are these: opium was administered or taken in a solid form that is perfectly evident. If there was opium there it was in the solid form. We see it with the naked eye. The analysis might not be sufficient. The reactions of meconic acid and the reactions of morphia, especially from the chemist’s point of view, may not be satisfactory, though satisfactory from the common sense point-of-view. But how could the reactions of morphia and opium have come there accidentally? When we find the smell of opium and the bitterness of opium, which is certainly very characteristic, looking for opium, it is quite enough…’

So thought the Lord Justice-Clerk. Quite enough, and more than enough - it was a wonder he had let him go so far. `I think you had probably better not proceed further at present.’ Still he had started a hare, one that would run. It was probably unwise, and certainly ironical, to have used the expression `from a common sense point-of-view’. A common sense point-of-view, that precisely described how the jury had come to their verdict. It was hard to say positively, on the strength of the evidence, that Chantrelle had killed Lizzie, harder still to say that the Crown had thoroughly proved its case. In the long run, that was not so important. Not for nothing had Edinburgh been the home of the common sense school of Philosophy, for when you came down to it, that was what operated here. Common sense could devise no other explanation for Lizzie’s death. Common sense said that Chantrelle, the jealous, alcoholic, violent, needy, unprincipled frequenter of brothels, had done for his wife.

There could be no appeal, but it was possible to address a petition for mercy to the Home Secretary. (The Office of Secretary of State for Scotland did not yet exist.) Chantrelle himself drew up a memorial, which his solicitors transmitted to Whitehall. Meanwhile, a public petition, praying for commutation of sentence, was also forwarded. This drew the Home Secretary’s attention to the purely circumstantial nature of the evidence, to the fact that no evidence of opium was discovered in the body and that, `when opium was discovered on the sheet upon which the deceased lay, which sheet however had been in the possession of various persons, including the prisoner’s mother-in-law … crude stains of opium were discovered upon it. This stain, while it was verified to contain crude opium, was never verified to have been in the stomach of the deceased … further, the experienced infirmary nurse swore that the dark opium stain was not on it, and was distinct from the other vomits upon the other linens, which other vomits were found to have contained no opium whatever.’

The petitioners then elaborated a case which had a close resemblance to Chantrelle’s: `a similar case of suspected poisoning was demonstrated by a careful post-mortem examination to have been only a case of kidney disease … the patient was a married woman of about thirty years of age, whose life had been insured for a large sum only some six months previously. Her husband was in great poverty. The case was under the care of Dr Sutherland, who was so struck by the symptoms in the case, that he called in the aid of an independent physician, … who, without any collusion, at once expressed a similar opinion that the case was one of poisoning. Dr Littlejohn, already referred to as a Police Expert, was then applied to, who expressed a similar conviction, nothwithstanding that no poison could be detected in the urine which was submitted for examination. In a few days she died, when a joint examination, where the husband’s interests were represented, laid bare beyond the possibility of dispute that the case was one of undiagnosable kidney disease…’

So they suggested that Lizzie had likewise died of natural causes, that Chantrelle, entering the room when summoned by Mary Byrne, at once perceived that she was dying, and that, `the evil thought then occurred to him for the first time how he could turn her death to his account. To cheat the Accidental Assurance Company was the evil suggestion….’ In support of their theory, the Memorialists stated that it was, `inconceivable had the prisoner poisoned his wife by opium that he should have retained in his possession for four days the damning evidence in the stains upon the sheet, which he had ample means of destroying, on the one hand, while, on the other, he had a perfect knowledge that an inquiry was going on against him.’

This was spirited pleading, and it attracted vociferous support. It posited a combination of accident and malice, amounting to conspiracy, and there are always those, possessed of a constitutional dislike for the obvious, who will hasten to embrace conspiracy theories. It could hardly be called satisfactory, for the three legs on which it rested were all shaky. First, it suggested that someone, probably Mrs Dyer, had stained the sheet with opium to implicate Chantrelle; that was of course the essence of his outburst in court, but there was no evidence whatsoever to support it. Clearly, it could have happened and Mrs Dyer had certainly no reason to wish Chantrelle well; but it remained’no more than an interesting assumption. Second, the theory assumed that an innocent Chantrelle had recognised at first glance that Lizzie was dying when he entered her room in the morning; that was a quick diagnosis indeed. Third, the parallel case proved nothing. The kidney was a red herring, for in the report of the postmortem examination it was stated that, `the liver and kidneys were congested, but otherwise, both they and the other abdominal organs were healthy’. It did not seem then that Lizzie had died of kidney disease.

Conspiracy theories and the like are better able to excite the idle than convince the responsible; and so it proved in this case. The Home Secretary could discover no reason to commute the sentence. Not even a last minute public meeting, held, appropriately enough some may think, at the Oddfellows Hall, could influence his judgement: Chantrelle must die.

He received the news stoically. `If it is to be, it must be’, he said. During the period of waiting he had earlier shown a sour misanthropy. A warder reported him as saying (‘between clenched teeth’ as befitted his role) `Would that I could but place a fuse in the centre of this earth, that I could blow it to pieces, and with it, the whole of humanity. I hate them.’ In the same spirit he had refused the ministrations of a Roman Catholic priest. Now, however, he made the customary obeisances to religion, confessing that he had led an evil life, but asserting that, deep down, he had always had a sense of the majesty of the Almighty. In the same correct and resigned manner, he accepted a decision that an interview with his children would be inexpedient. All this was very gratifying; it is, as we have seen, not only proper but pleasing to the conscience that the condemned to death should be seen to admit the error of their ways, and return with full penitence to the faith of their childhood. It makes the whole business of executions seem less like an act of revenge. In Chantrelle’s case it was all the more remarkable because he never admitted that he was guilty of the crime for which he had been sentenced.

This was all very decorous, though the old Adam was not yet dead. Asked by the Governor, the night before his execution, if there was anything he would like to have, he replied: `send in three bottles of champagne and a whore.’ The request was denied, and he shrugged his shoulders. It certainly has his authentic tone, even if it does not wholly accord with the lengthy statement he had handed over to the prison chaplain earlier in the evening. Then he had spoken of resting his hopes on Jesus; but he had also taken the opportunity yet again categorically to deny the murder. Everyone knew, he said, the love he had for his children; he could never have harmed their mother, and he wished them distinctly to understand this.

So, having asserted innocence, and been denied his whore, he slept soundly still he was woken at five. He prayed with the chaplain, breakfasted on coffee and eggs and a glass of brandy, and smoked a cigar. He still wore his suit of mourning. He was then pinioned by Marwood the hangman and conducted to the room of the chief warder where a short religious service was held. At the end of this, the chaplain made a final solemn plea, that he should now confess anything which he had hitherto denied. He declined to do so.

The execution was the first held in Edinburgh since Parliament had decided that Public Executions belonged to a coarser age. Nevertheless, a crowd had assembled, in bright sunlight, on the Calton Hill, hoping to be able to catch of glimpse of proceedings. They were disappointed. Things were so arranged that the procession - bailies, clergy, warders, prison governor, victim and hangman, - had only to cover some fifty yards, out of sight of the watchers, to an outhouse on the western side of the prison, which had been selected as the place of execution. The floor of the outhouse formed the roof of a deep cellar. A trap door, railed off with a low black screen, had been cut in the floor in such a way that, when a bolt was drawn, it gave way and was kept down by two sand-bags. The scaffold itself consisted of a crossbeam, between two uprights about seven feet high. A hook was attached to the beam. The rope hung from the hook.

It didn’t take long. Chantrelle watched calmly as the last adjustments were made. Everyone was impressed, and probably relieved, by his tranquillity. The chaplain began to recite The Lord’s Prayer. While he did so, Marwood withdrew the bolt; and that was that.

Jessie King

Or the Fate of Bastards

There was an army of them; over 20% of the population of Edinburgh, according to the 1881 census.

They got up early in the morning, six o’clock perhaps, and began cleaning, polishing the black-leaded kitchen ranges, scrubbing the front door-steps and the area; down on their hands and knees, scrubbing the stone flags of the kitchen; sweeping and polishing the diningroom where the family would take breakfast; tickling the cornices free of cobwebs with long feather dusters. Soon it was bathtime for the family; in relays they would carry bucket after heavy bucket of hot water up three, four, five flights of stairs; or perhaps, before then, they had already carried hot water for shaving or washing, or tea-trays to the bedrooms, where they withdrew the curtains, opened the shutters, tidied the clothes, and in winter, cleaned out, relaid and lit a fire. If it was winter, then there were downstairs fires to be raked out and laid (though never fires from May to October) great scuttles of coal to be filled from buckets carried all the way from the cellars in the area below the level of the street. Whatever the season the kitchen range had to be stoked and coal brought in for that. All day there was cleaning, and washing in the great tubs in the sub-basement, and ironing, and fetching and carrying and waiting on the family; work in the kitchen, work in the bedrooms, work all over the tall steep house with its hundredandfifty stairs from bottom to top. Of course there were lighter moments: meals in the kitchen, quick exchanges of gossip and chat with the various tradesmen and itinerant vendors who called at the house - the fishwife from Newhaven who always had a wealth of news, the coalman, the butcher’s cheeky boy, the postman, the grocer’s delivery man, they all kept the household in touch with the life of the streets. But still, much of the time, in the chaste squares and crescents of the New Town, or the tree-shrouded villas of the Grange and Morningside, the servants, almost all female, led secluded secret lives..

The young girls waited for the evening when they might be permitted to slip out for an hour or two, or for Sunday when they were sometimes free in the afternoon between church services. In some households they had a half-day off once a week, or perhaps t once a fortnight. Of course prudent employers, mindful of their duties to their dependents, would catechise them on their return, seeking to discover how they had passed these few hours of dangerous leisure, when, as everyone knew, Satan might find mischief for idle hands. (It was presumed, no doubt correctly, that the employers themselves, though frequently idle, were possessed of a moral robustness that served as a guard against the devil’s wiles.) But there were of course households where the mistress was less particular, or there were girls who had the ability to deceive and few scruples about doing so. These were highspirited maids, or simply weak, in thrall to the flesh or responding heathily to natural desire. It did not really matter how it was put. They were girls who, on their brief excursions from Service, excursions which might take them to the dance hall, the public house, to some waste piece of ground, or for a walk along the Water of Leith or in the windy expanses of the Queen’s Park by Holyrood, contrived to get into trouble.