Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (8 page)

He soon left Mary at home and came to Scotland. It was stated at his trial that he could `assign no reason for coming here but for want of employment’; it is difficult to see why he should have been expected to do so, since this reason was obviously valid enough. Ireland before the famine was overpopulated. There is no evidence that he intended his separation from his new wife to be lasting. The plan may have been that she should follow him to Scotland when he had established himself, a common enough course in such circumstances. If so, his susceptibility soon raised an obstacle, for he had not been long in Scotland when he met and married a Paisley girl called jean Hamilton in December 1839.

Married now to Jean, his thoughts reverted to Mary. Perhaps he saw no reason why he should not live as a sultan; there were also Biblical precedents for polygamy. Perhaps however he was simply confused. Almost certainly he did not achieve the insouciance of a Captain Macheath singing `how happy could I be with either, were ‘tother dear charmer away’. At any rate he returned to Ireland and persuaded Mary to come to Scotland with him. Perhaps she insisted on accompanying him, against his will; we have no means of telling. However that might be, his absence, according to jean Hamilton’s sister, Helen, who was to be the agent ofhis eventual downfall, `caused considerable uneasiness to his wife, owing to staying away longer than the time spoken of’.

He brought Mary back and established her in Airdrie. If he intended to alternate between the two women, his determination was not put to the test, for Mary died and was buried in Airdrie in an unnamed grave. (That was probably meanness rather than duplicity, for Bennison was to show himself recurrently and unpleasantly mean.) Later there were to be suggestions that he was responsible for her death. No evidence exists to support this charge. He continued to deny it right up to the end. The least we can do is credit his word, for he had eventually motive to confess rather than to continue to deny. However, Mary’s death can hardly have failed to make him realise that death can offer a satisfactory solution to matrimonial complications.

He felt constrained to wear mourning for Mary, though no one in Paisley knew of her existence, let alone her death, and he would have avoided any possible awkwardness if he had not drawn this attention on himself. Moreover, on his return to jean, he took with him a bundle of female clothes and told his wife that the mourning was for his sister, whose clothes these were. On being asked why he had not brought her to Paisley, he replied that he had been anxious to get her to her destination, which was an old master’s in Airdrie. It was as if he, deliberately invited suspicion.

There was one nasty moment when he was accosted in chapel in Paisley by a little man who said,

`I think I know you.’ `Do you?’

`Was it not you that buried your wife recently in Airdrie?’ Bennison was quick to assure him that he was mistaken. He must be thinking of somebody else. The incident stuck however in Helen Glass’s memory and she reported it at the trial. She also `thought that her sister has the impression on her mind that the clothes which Bennison had brought were the clothes of another wife’.

Nevertheless jean appeared to accept his story. Even when they visited Ireland and she met his sister, still alive, and naturally pushed her questioning further, she seemed satisfied with his new explanation that the dead girl was `his sister in the lord’. She wasn’t, likely enough, that naive. Still Helen’s version may equally well be the result of spite working on memory. One should never underestimate the human capacity for credulity, and Bennison was already so firmly in the grip of the religious enthusiasm that was to lead a witness at his trial to say that, `his conversation was wholly confined to religious subjects’, that Jean may indeed have found his explanation genuinely satisfactory. She herself was to be described as `a very religious person’.

As to the decision to wear mourning, one can only conclude that Bennison felt a deep-seated respect for convention; it was the right thing to do and he would have been failing in his duty to himself if he had not. If this was hypocrisy, it was wellengrained.

About this time they removed to Edinburgh. For some years they lived at the bottom of Leith Walk, that natural starting point for immigrants. A daughter, named Helen after her aunt, was born in 1843. Around 1847 Bennison found work with the Shotts’ Iron Company and they moved a little up the Walk to Stead’s Place, a dismal row of gaunt tenements.

Their dwelling consisted of two rooms and a closet. It was on the level of the street with a sunk area below, this basement flat being inhabited by a widow, Elizabeth Wilkie. At some point in 1849 a Mrs Moffat came to live with the Bennisons, presumably as a lodger. How they were disposed is difficult to determine. Bennison and his wife slept in different rooms, Jean being evidently in the kitchen where there was probably a box bed, or rather two, for one assumes that Mrs Moffat slept there also. Across the landing was another flat, occupied by an old man, Alexander Milne, and his dog. He was to testify to the good relations between Bennison and Jean. `I never heard angry words between him and his wife, and never heard them speak unkindly to the other.’

There was to be much argument at the trial as to the condition of the block, in particular as to whether it was infested with rats or not. The general opinion inclined to the absence of rats, at least by the time the Bennisons came to live there. Alexander Marr, one of the neighbours, certainly claimed that there had been a good many at one time, but asserted that he had smoked them out with brimstone and filled up their holes. They had come, in his opinion, from the common sewer in Leith Walk, from which there was a grating opposite Bennison’s house. For good measure he added that there was another sewer at the back of the house also. Elizabeth Wilkie produced the argument that was held to settle the matter: she kept live fowls in her cellar and maintained that that would have been impossible if there had been any rats about at all. Though Alex Macmurray, a wire-worker who lived nineteen yards from the Bennisons, contradicted this, and declared that he had himself killed eleven, his dead rats had no chance in the minds of the jury against Mrs Wilkie’s live fowls. The dearth of rats undoubtedly helped to hang Bennison.

Bennison worked hard at Shotts’ foundry, though his habit of incessantly singing hymns and psalms failed to endear him to his fellow-workmen. He joined the local Wesleyan Church, which was not at that time considered incompatible with membership of other churches, the Wesleyans regarding themselves as a ginger-group of enthusiasts, with a consequent attraction for, zealots like Bennison. It was affirmed later that he had been a lay preacher and had taught in the Sunday School. The Minister, the Rev John Hay, was quick to deny this, and to dissociate the Church from him to some degree. `His manner was always peculiar’, he said, `he was a man excited in religious feelings.’ The fact that Mr Hay’s oratory had contributed to this excitement was something better ignored.

It is a minor irritation that judgements on the appearance, manner and character of murderers tend to be delivered after the event; they are therefore all too frequently governed by a post hoc propter hoc subjectivity. It is rare for us to have a candid picture of the murderer before he has committed his crime or stands accused of murder. Consequently he will be expected to conform to certain stereotypes: he will be `deceptively innocent in appearance’ or `frankly sinister’. The latter was Bennison’s fate. He is described as being `of dark hair and eyes, projecting forehead, sallow complexion, very bushy whiskered.’ We do not need to be told that `his aspect is rather sinister’ or directed to observe `his prurient eye’ to recognise him as a stock figure of Victorian melodrama. It naturally follows that he should be seen to fix hostile witnesses during his trial with `an extraordinary glare’. That is casting to type, presenting a dramatically just appearance; se non a vero, a ben trovato. He had a strong Irish accent. It comes as a shock to discover that one of his fellow-workers complained because he was perpetually smiling.

Despite the sinister appearance that would be recognised with such certainty, no sign of villainy emerged for some years. If he had indeed murdered his first wife, he showed no mark of guilt and no desire to make a practice of it. Instead he settled into being a respectable. member of the community, becoming known as a reliable worker and displaying a deep religious seriousness.

The evangelical religion to which he adhered was one of the strongest forces of the century. Essentially its appeal was emotional. It was concerned to arouse a sense of sin and personal unworthiness, so that the convert, shocked by his plight, should make a complete commitment of his soul, his being, his whole life on earth, to Christ. Evangelical meetings were rich in personal testimony, as redeemed sinner after redeemed sinner bore witness to the evil of his former ways and to the joy with which he had embraced the faith. The pastors knew that `enthusiasm’, that word which the Laodicean eighteenth century had so disdained, slackens easily; it was kept screwed to the pitch by regular prayer meetings and Bible study as well as Sunday services.

At its best - and its best was frequent - this religion aroused genuine moral fervour, and bred an insistence on high standards of behaviour. The results found full expression in the great works of Victorian philanthropy. Without the Evangelicals, attempts to bring religion to the poor and outcast would have been few indeed; practical measures to alleviate the misery of the new industrial cities equally rare. Most of what was good in nineteenth century culture will be found to have an evangelical strain.

Nevertheless there was another side. The absence of the institutional element in this religion, the lack of tradition, and the stress on personality, all combined to make it a natural home for hypocrites, exhibitionists and frauds. Confession is doubtless good for the soul, but repeated and public confession may easily become self-indulgence. Eloquence is an admirable quality, but one that corrupts when it is employed for its own sake. A consciousness of redemption is strong liquor for weak heads.

To say this is not to attribute insincerity to the enthusiasts. Only, there are always degrees and levels of sincerity, which is not a quality to be accorded an uncritical admiration; it is always fair to question the object towards which sincerity is directed. This is particularly true in the case of men like Bennison, sincere and secure in their own virtue. Yet there is no reason to suppose him a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is anyway a most wearing profession, demanding the almost permanent assumption of a mask. It is not like adultery for instance, a vice which can be practised in your spare time. The poor hypocrite can never afford to relax.

It would seem that Bennison’s state was more complicated than that. His religion was genuine enough. Only, being the sort of religion that ministered to self-indulgence, a religion moreover which encouraged each devotee to be judge of his own spiritual condition, it was easily perverted to selfglorification. No one is more easily duped than the Chosen. Nothing contributes to pride like the certainty of salvation, of being one of the Elect, and the constant self-criticism which the Evangelicals, like modern Maoists, affected to practise, may fairly be regarded as an insidious form of self-flattery. `All censure of a man’s self, wrote Samuel Johnson, `is oblique praise.’ No wonder then that this intense, rambling, self-indulgent religion could breed men like Bennison who came to believe that whatever he wanted was permitted.

In the Spring of 1850 his desires became apparent. At prayer meetings he had encountered a young girl called Margaret Robertson to whom he was quickly attracted. Before long they were walking home together in the gloaming, while Bennison offered spiritual comfort and instruction, and, perhaps, other attentions that were less spiritual. For Margaret was young, pretty, devout, and, most important, admiring. Though she was later to say that she had had `a sweetheart at the time of these meetings and it has given me pain to be supposed that I was flirting with Bennison’, this putative sweetheart plays no part in the story and has never been identified. If he existed, he must, on the evidence led, have been complaisant enough. As far as Bennison was concerned, Margaret Robertson had a soul to be moulded and a body to be won. He seems to have decided in only a few weeks that she was to take the place of his wife, who (among other faults) no longer attended prayer meetings (she had a young daughter to look after) and, more to the point perhaps, did not properly appreciate him. He had fallen into the classic husband trap for weak vain men; he felt his wife did not value him sufficiently, because she esteemed him truly.

This time there could be no burying in a nameless grave, no mourning worn for a sister of the Lord. Bennison now had a certain position in the community, something he had worked for, a status that matters more acutely perhaps to the immigrant than to the native who has never felt the lack of it. Moreover, and still more pertinently, jean had family, in particular, her sister Helen Glass now living nearby in Lochend Road, Leith. Respectability and prudence, working, as they so often do, in harness, dictated the solution. Jean had to die and her death had to be accepted as natural.

His tongue busily spread stories of her failing health. This is of course a regular device; almost the first rule of the domestic murder. There was however some evidence to back it up. Even Helen Glass admitted that jean was `a little delicate in winter and troubled with a cough’. Mrs Moffat, the lodger, went further: Jean `was very weakly and much troubled with sweating’. It may have been this that had prompted Bennison to join a Funeral Society in November 1849, some months before his first recorded meeting with Margaret Robertson. There was nothing sinister in this. Such societies were the poor’s only insurance. A respectable man like Bennison could not neglect such provision as would enable him to bury his wife decently, should such a sad eventuality be necessary. Yet, paradoxically, the precaution may have encouraged his mind to turn towards the course of elimination, the moment temptation appeared.