Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (21 page)

They were then allowed to pass through to the execution chamber. Canon Donlevy was still standing by the edge of the drop, his eyes closed, his lips moving in prayer. Berry, `an unwashed looking figure, had struck a reflective attitude, and was gazing, chin on hand, down upon the body. “She has never moved since the drop”, he said, sotto voce.’ They looked down. The crucifix was still clutched firmly in her hand.

At about that moment, or perhaps a little earlier, Catherine Gunn -‘witness was in domestic service and could not keep the child’ - withdrew the heavy velvet curtains of her mistress’s bedroom, and commented on the fine bright spring-like weather. Her black dress rustled as she closed the door behind her and tripped briskly down the long flight of stairs to the basement.

Of course the case provoked argument and recrimination. What it revealed of the callous traffic in infants, of the carelessness with which they were cast out into the world, of their wholly unregulated disposal, was disquieting and discreditable. The Scotsman remarked that, `in foreign countries - in Naples for instance, there are Foundling Institutions where deserted children, the offspring in most cases of guilty passions, are cared for and brought up….’ But, the writer felt, and doubtless the good sense of respectable Edinburgh would have agreed, that this was hardly the answer. Did not the existence of such institutions serve as a support, even an encouragement, of vice? Who would feel the need of continence and chastity if they knew that a Foundling Hospital existed to receive and rear the fruits of sin? Such reasoning might be specious - the twenty-nine applicants for Alexander Gunn had shown that disposal of the fruits of sin presented no difficulty as it was; yet, for all that, the reasoning was not without force.

Nor, one must admit, did it lack prescience:

`The scandals that occasionally arise in connection with that saintly institution, the Foundling Hospital at Naples, are enough to make humanity shudder. Of 856 children living under its motherly care during 1895, 853 “died” in the course of that one year - only three survived; a wholesale massacre. These 853 murdered children were carried forward as still living, and the institution, which has a yearly revenue of over 600,000 francs, was debited with their maintenance, while forty-two doctors continued to draw salaries for their services to these innocents that had meanwhile been starved and tortured to death. The official report on these horrors ends with the words: “There is no reason to think that these facts are peculiar to the year 1895”….’

Norman Douglas: Old Calabria, Note, pp.72-3

Such a report makes Jessie King seem small beer, a wretched amateur, a tyro.

Donald Merrett

Or the Pike Swims Free

There is a style of writing about Edinburgh so common as to amount to cliche. Essentially it consists of drawing a contrast between the Romantic Old Town and the Classical New. The writer describes, frequently in hectic tone, and always in lurid hues, the pell-mell conditions of life as it clung to the spine of the rock running from the Castle to Holyrood, with all its dirt, squalor, vivacity, the bohemian taverns and contiguity of classes, in short its feverish intensity. The New Town on the other hand, lying across the deep divide of the old Nor’ Loch, is portrayed as cool, chaste, restrained, elegant, bourgeois. The adjectives pile up endlessly. Then perhaps the writer goes on to dramatise the contrast in terms of Deacon Brodie (who pursued his double life exclusively in the OldTown), Jekyll and Hyde, doppelgangers, even perhaps, if he is of a unusually literary turn, the Caledonian Antizyzygy. It always makes an impressive and entertaining passage. There is something in it too. The move of the middle classes from the Old Town did denote more than a geographical exodus. It was a first step towards changing the character of the city.

Nevertheless it is possible to overstate the contrast; and this for two reasons. First, while the advocates, doctors and professors mostly removed their residences to the New Town, where they would almost all be found living by 1830, the situation of the Law Courts in Parliament House, and of the university and infirmary, meant that they passed their working lives in the intense, even foetid, atmosphere of the Old Town. As for the advocates, who did so much to give the tone of the city, many of their clients, at least at the Criminal Bar, were necessarily drawn from the wynds and closes that clung to the skirts of Lawnmarket, High Street and Canongate; they themselves continued to spend hours in the taverns around St Giles. There could, in these circumstances, be no absolute divorce of Old and New.

Second, the New Town itself was less of a piece than the cliche would have us believe. This is particularly true of its eastern end, where lanes housing artisans’ workshops thread their way between the backs of terrace and squares. There was more of a social mix than might be at first apparent. Cumberland Street and the now vanished Jamaica Street, for instance, were never without their artisan inhabitants. The bourgeois quarter drifted almost imperceptibly, around Broughton Street and LeithWalk, towards Canonmills and Stockbridge, into streets where prostitution and crime were common. After all Jessie King had lived and killed not far from prosperous terraces like Inverleith and Ann Street. In the same way, farther up the hill, the correct imposing boulevards, Princes Street, George Street and Queen Street, were divided by sordid alleys where vice was for purchase. The Chantrelle case had revealed brothels in Clyde Street, just round the corner from the banks in St Andrew’s Square.

It is in detail, timing, exact geographical distinction, rather than in essence, that the contrast is misleading. Undeniably the perceived character of Edinburgh changed between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, so that distinct aspects of the city, tending towards schizophrenia or a double life, are recognised. The colloquial summary of that character - `fur coat and nae knickers’ - may be too condensed; it is at least an attempt to catch the paradox that many have discerned. How did Auld Reekie become, `East Windy and West Endy’? How did the tumultuous city of `Gardy-loo’ become known among other Scots for its genteel and refined frigidity?

The answer is not to be found in the New Town as such, which, despite its classical facade, retained so much of the rich mixture of the eighteenth century city. The clue however lies in that summary -‘East Windy and West Endy’. One must look to the West End, to the terraces and squares built beyond Charlotte Square, the Queensferry Road and the Dean Bridge, to find this restrictedly correct, almost exclusively middle class denial of the sordid and seamy; a denial which is primarily an attempt to simplify life. And one must look to a later period than the time when the New Town proper was built. Absurd, on reflection, to suppose that the Edinburgh of Boswell, Scott and Cockburn could have bred such a mood or style of living. It had to wait till later, till after the Regency, the Railway Age and the exuberant period of early Victorian expansion, till there was a sufficient diffusion of a rentier class wedded to the pious virtues of evangelical Christianity and domestic decency. Nothing shows this more perfectly than Buckingham Terrace and the Merrett case, which took place there as late as 1926.

Buckingham Terrace, shielded from the traffic of the Queensferry Road by a row of trees and a secondary access road, even today breathes an atmosphere of gentility, characteristic of the whole area. It is a part of town where life insists on its privacy and respectability; it goes with Turkey carpets, kidneys for breakfast and roast mutton; the terrace is tall, withdrawn and curiously silent. There is no street life, it is detached from the traffic and there are no shops in a wide area around, though, nowadays, the terraces opposite, some fifty yards away on the other side of the Queensferry Road, have been turned into private hotels. Built around the middle of the nineteenth century, these houses, demanding, commodious, yet in no way elegant, fit homes of Edinburgh Forsytes, were, even by 1918, losing attraction and being converted into flats; flats which attracted widows, the honourably retired, or spinster ladies. There they indulged in bridge, tea-parties and the gentle gossip that delights in tracing remote family connections and in the most modest and correct specualtion about neighbours and common acquaintance. Nowhere in Edinburgh, not even Morningside, was more respectable. It was this quality, more than anything else, that was to lead to what was almost certainly a miscarriage of justice in the Merrett case.

Mrs Merrett was a newcomer to the terrace. She was the daughter of a prosperous Manchester wine merchant. In 1907 she had married a New Zealander, John Alfred Merrett, an electrical engineer. Their only child, Donald, was born in New Zealand in August 1908. Soon afterwards they moved across the world, to Russia, at that time, in the last ten years before the First World War, engaged in the most rapid economic expansion of its history. There Mr Merrett, whose conduct at least suggests considerable enterprise, took a job in St Petersburg. His enterprise may have been combined with a difficult character, for the marriage did not last long. Soon Mrs Merrett was living apart from her husband, in Switzerland; then later in New Zealand again. Nothing more is known of her husband. She was to tell her maid in Buckingham Terrace, one Rita Sutherland, that she had had a hard life and had lost her husband in the War. Her sister, Mrs Penn, later affirmed however that Mr Merrett was still alive and working in India. However that might be he made no further contribution of any kind to his family. Fortunately Mrs Merrett had been comfortably provided for by her father; she had in fact a little over £700 a year, which represented a competence, if no great wealth.

She was devoted to her only son. Donald was in certain respects growing up fast. At the age of sixteen he was tall (well over six foot), manly, bright; but difficult. No doubt he was’ spoiled, allowed too much of his own way. The relationship between a doting mother and an only son is always fraught. This one was no exception. Donald was indulged, yet carefully watched over; he grew up demanding and deceitful.

Mrs Merrett brought him back to the United Kingdom in 1924 and sent him first to Malvern College. Academically he did well enough - he was quick and superficially mature. His conduct however was a good deal less than satisfactory. He took ill to discipline and he had little of the respect for the conventions and traditions of the school which was demanded of him. Malvern was then an excessively correct place; nowhere were upper lips stiffer or the done thing more exactly circumscribed. Merrett, a mocker, egoist and rebel, was immune to the charms of the public school spirit. After a year his mother took him away; no one was sorry.

What she thought of him at this time, and of the school’s failure, can only be surmised. At any rate, acting apparently on the advice of family or friends, she determined that Donald should no longer proceed to Oxford as had been the original intention. Life there would offer him too much freedom. It was better that he remain under his mother’s watchful eye; a Scottish university would be preferable and Edinburgh was chosen. It was non-residential and he could live with his mother. Her only care being for her son, she resolved to move to Edinburgh and set up house with him. The wisdom of this course was doubtful, however well-intentioned; it almost invited rebellion of some kind.

He was however entered for the bye-term beginning January 1926. Mother and son came to Scotland at Christmas time, spending the festive season at the Melrose Hydropathic, not perhaps the most exhilarating choice for a youth of Donald’s temperament. In Edinburgh they lodged first at a boarding house in Palmerston Place before renting the flat in Buckingham Terrace. Nothing could more exactly place Mrs Merrett’s utter respectability than these addresses. Her landlady at Palmerston Place and her acquaintances in Edinburgh concurred in finding her worthy of them. For Mrs Sharp, the landlady, `Mrs Merrett was “a cheerful and bright woman, a person of methodical habits.”’ She never saw her `in an excitable state’, praise indeed. One of her friends said that ‘everything she did, she did to perfection.’ She knew how to behave.

The flat she had taken was small but sufficient, a conversion on the first, or drawing-room, floor. It consisted of a sittingroom and bedroom to the front (the two rooms being carved out of the old drawing-room), and another bedroom, the kitchen and bathroom to the rear. Between the sittingroom and the kitchen was a small lobby, formerly the space between or behind the double doors which would have opened from the drawing-room to the dining-room or master bedroom behind. In the manner of such conversions the result was convenient enough, though the rooms were oddly proportioned, with broken cornices and, to the front, an unnatural and ugly division. The lack of elegance was doubtless compensated by the good address and the absence of anything in the immediate neighbourhood that could distract the boy from his studies. There was no maid’s room, but Mrs Merrett was happy to see to some of the domestic chores herself, and engaged a young woman, Rita Sutherland, married but separated from her husband, to come in on a daily basis. They took possession of the flat on 10 March. Mrs Merrett, with several friends in the city, settled down to quiet domesticity and the enjoyment of her boy’s university years. She wrote, to her bankers, saying `Donald is doing well at the University and is quite settled down to the life here.’

He had certainly settled, but the university had seen little of him. He found the work boring or pointless, and his fellow students, at that time mostly the well-behaved products of the city schools, limited and unambitious. Donald asked for more from life than the round of lecture room and library, the absorption in the family life, and rugby, hockey, cricket and tennis parties that satisfied these decent young men. He required more too than the ten shillings a week which his mother allowed him. He wanted to live; oh dear, yes, he wanted to live.

His conception of life was not in fact frightfully demanding. It revolved round motor bicycles and an establishment in Picardy Place called the Dunedin Palais de Danse; there he found his true garden of delights. Roughead’s Victorian good taste might shrink from what he termed `this dreadful designation’. Many would have agreed with him, seeing the proliferation of such establishments - the Edinburgh Evening News regularly carried front-page advertisements for seven or eight Palais - as a mark of the godless decadence of the postwar generation. Amongst such places - and the Palais de Danse was to the nineteen-twenties what the discotheque has been to the seventies - the Dunedin was by no means the least reputable. Its advertisements combine novelty with restraint: an `exhibition of the latest dance from America’, for instance `the famous “Black Bottom”, demonstrated by Miss Vena Simpson and Mr J B Ingram’. The famous comedian, Tommy Lorne, was `the colossal attraction’ at the annual Pantomime Ball held during Donald’s trial; music was provided by Pete McGovern and his Westminster Band. Lessons were given in new dances, Charleston as well as Black Bottom, and enthusiasts could learn varieties of tango, waltz and foxtrot. A still more restrained note was struck by the announcement that `Special The Dansant Tickets may be had on entrance, and will include a Dainty Tea served in the popular Cafe Rouge’. No establishment that offered that staple of Edinburgh existence, the Afternoon Tea, a `Dainty’ one at that, could be wholly given over to vice and debauchery. Though its advertisements also promised that private rooms could be hired, the Dunedin was respectable enough, a place where Edinburgh’s wellborn youth could flutter their wings a little. The widow of a celebrated novelist remembers being taken there by a would-be beau, subsequently a QC; she was fifteen and he bought her her first glass of sherry. It was clearly a place to impress a girl.