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| A Victorian beauty?... |
Jack House was a Glasgow journalist with the Evening Citizen who went on
to become an author, broadcaster and historian of old Glasgow. His book, Square
Mile of Murder, was first published in 1961. (Actually, I've measured House's square mile on a map and it is in fact a square half-mile, but then 'square mile' sounds more euphonious. Another interesting point is that at the extreme southern-west corner of House's square is St. Joseph's Roman Catholic chapel, where the serial killer Peter Tobin worked before murdering the young Polish women, Angelika Kluk, who helped there before burying her under the chapel floor. It was this murder that led to his capture. It is believed he may have been responsible for over fifty killings although the exact number is unknown. I intend a section on this incident at a later date.) As he points out in his
introduction ‘all the best murders in Glasgow have taken place in the West End
in the spring or the summer’. The random shootings in the early 90s took place
in the spring. House's book concerns itself with four historic and famous cases
of the Victorian and Edwardian era, beginning with the Madeleine Smith trial of
1857; the case of Jessie McLachlan in 1862; the trial and execution of Dr
Pritchard, the ‘human crocodile’, in 1865; and the miscarriage of justice of
Oscar Slater, condemned in 1909. Despite the late-date of Slater’s trial, and as
House points out, all the cases are essentially Victorian as the judgement of guilt or innocence hinges upon... respectability.
The Square Mile in question encompasses Blythswood Square where
Madeleine Smith 'allegedly' poisoned her lover, Pierre Emile L’Angelier in her
father’s home; Sandyford Place, where Jessie McLachlan is charged with
murdering her friend (and which is part of Sauchiehall Street but set off from
the main road and independently named); Berkeley Terrace, around the corner
from Sandyford Place, where Dr Pritchard murdered one of his victims, his other
two murders being committed in Sauchiehall Street towards Blythswood Square;
and the final location being West Princess Street, in a flat which I have been
inside, as has Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and where Oscar Slater was said to have
beaten to death Marion Gilchrist. By an odd coincidence, the crazy bastard who
began shooting at random in the 1990s did so at almost exactly the centre of Jack House's Square
Mile of Murder. I wonder if he'd ever read the book? Another
minor coincidence is that Madeleine Smith’s home was not far from the one in
which the architect John James Burnet grew-up and Smith’s father was a
prominent architect who would certainly have known Burnet’s father. Anyone
familiar with Glasgow will know the work of Madeline Smith's father. He designed the
McLellan Galleries on Sauchiehall Street and supervised Stirling’s Library,
Miller Street. Both are still there, as is Madeleine Smith’s house at
Blythswood Square and it has hardly changed since her time.
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Smith's
home as it was in 2017 when it sold for £2.45 million. Smith's bedroom window
was on the side-street to the right, leading to Sauchiehall Street. She is said
to have leaned out of it to give L'Angelier his lethal hot-chocolate.
Madeleine Smith was acquitted of poisoning her lover, which she
almost certainly did. The jury had no trouble finding her innocent. She was the
daughter of a respectable and wealthy architect. She was also the archetypal
Victorian beauty – in pictures of her as a teenager she looks remarkably like
the illustrations for David Copperfield's sister in Dickens’ book. In later pictures, such as the one above, she doesn't fit the modern criteria of beauty. She looks strict, stern, and forbidding. Her lover, L’Angelier, was
considered a foreigner – he was born on Jersey and his father was French – and
was a near penniless clerk in a seedsman store, earning, at most, ten-bob a
week - 50p. At the trial, he was accused of attempting to blackmail her. His one
fault seems to be that he took her love seriously. The impression I get from
Madeleine Smith is that it was all just a game. She was very flirtatious, aware
of her beauty, loved the attention of men, and seems fascinated by the
effect she was having on L’Angelier. On a couple of occasions, she very calmly
called the affair off at her father’s insistence, only taking it up again at
the insistence of the distraught L’Angelier. Madeleine liked to play parts. In
her later years, when she had abandoned her family to live elsewhere, she
called herself Lena, and, in letters when she was younger, she sometimes
adopted the name Mimi. As House points out, when she wrote as Mimi she wrote as
a completely different person, her personality and hand-writing, as expressed in the letters, completely changed. She might be labelled a split-personality in a
court-room today.
I have an image for the 101 views. Picture Madeleine Smith, sitting in
the dock, simpering before the gaze of the all-male jury. Every now and again,
she flickers her eye-lashes. No tears though. She remains cool throughout. Ah!
The ignominy, the infamy of sitting before the jury while her private life is
picked apart by that cad of a prosecutor, her private letters read out for the
titillation of the public gallery, which is full. Whenever a salacious detail
is mentioned she bows her head slightly and conjures up a blush which appears
like a drop of blood on the petal of a pure white rose. ‘The shame of it! That
this innocent woman’s suffering should be prolonged on account of that filthy
seducing Frenchman! My God…! If he weren’t dead already we’d lynch him!’ You
can feel the jury’s mounting anger. She’s loving the attention of all the men -
the jury, the cops, the judge, the newspapermen. They’re ready to acquit
immediately, to hoist her on their shoulders and lead her on a victory parade
down Sauchiehall Street – if the trial hadn’t taken place in Edinburgh.
Thousands, literally, gathered in the street to see her. A reporter wrote; ‘The
personal appearance of Miss Smith… is the point on which most attention seems
to be fixed in the court…. Every day sees hundreds at the door of the court who
would willingly expend guineas in obtaining a look at the young lady…. Others,
who are privileged to sit in the court… may be seen surveying the slight figure
in the dock with eyes that never weary of gazing upon it.’
Jack House calls her ruthless as well as romantic. As soon
as she met a more preferential suitor (earning £3000 a year to
L’Angelier’s £52 - and that was after his wages were doubled), the tone of her
letters cooled-down. She still professed her abiding love to L’Angelier on the
23rd of January 1857. On January 28th she accepted the
other man’s proposal of marriage. Sixty years later, she could not even
remember L’Angelier’s first name. She called him Louis rather than
Emile... a man for whose murder she had faced the prospect of the
gallows.
‘Whatsisname?’
If anyone went to the trouble to read Madeleine Smith’s letters, it was obvious that she was the one seducing the very proper L’Angelier who
was embarrassed and ashamed about having had sex with her before marriage. But
she assured him he was already her husband and continually referred to
him as such, even after she was engaged to the other man.
The motive for the murder was simple enough. She asked L’Angelier to
return all her letters to him before her wedding. He said he regarded her as his wife and
would show all the letters to her father to prove their intimacy, hoping the
father would compel her to marry him. She pleaded with him not to do so and
asked to meet with him again, secretly. A few days later, he wrote in his
diary:
Thus. 19 Feb. Saw Mimi a few moments was very ill during the night
Madeleine had given him coffee and chocolate with a dash of arsenic which she'd bought that day - for the garden of their country home, as she claimed. As the
days passed, she bought arsenic again and again – to kill rats. While she was
on holiday with her family, L'Angelier began to feel much better. But by Monday 23nd March, L’Angelier was dead, having met with
Madeleine the night before and come home from her house unwell. Post-mortem
examination of L’Angelier discovered enough arsenic to kill forty men. On March
31st Madeleine Smith was arrested and charged with his murder. The defence’s main point was that L’Angelier was the sort of man who
would commit suicide. Why? Because he was French. Probably his temperamental Gallic nature.
Madeleine Smith was found Not Guilty on the first charge of
administering poison. Of the second charge, and of the charge of murder, she was
found Not Proven. House calls this a peculiarly Scottish verdict which means…
'Go away, and don’t do it again!' Not Proven is a judgement exclusive to Scotland and one which has been contentious for over 100 years. It means the jury considers there to be suspicion but not enough evidence to convict. We think you're guilty but we can't prove it. Or, in Madeleine's case, we know you're guilty but we don't want to convict - the filthy Frenchman deserved it. Madeleine Smith’s defence lawyer sank into
his seat and put his hands over his head – he seemed to have known that he was
responsible for freeing a guilty woman. When he left the court, he did not
shake hands with her.
During the course of the trial, Madeleine had received ‘several hundred
letters, all from gentlemen, some offering me consolation, and some their
hearths and homes.’ She heard nothing, though, from the man she was engaged to
who was reported to be ill, to which she replied; ‘I don’t much care’. He never
saw her again. The £4000 cost of her defence was paid for by a few leading
Glasgow merchants. One old bachelor alone gave £1000.
David Lean turned the story into a 1950 film called Madeleine, starring
Ann Todd in the title role.
'Hot chocolate, dear?'
Madeleine Smith lived on for seventy years. As the saying goes, her
father was left a broken man by the trial. He died five years later. Her mother
took to her bed and never left it. Her younger sisters never married. Madeleine
didn't give a damn. She married an art teacher she met in Plymouth and became
Lena Wardle. They moved to Bloomsbury where she became a noted hostess and met
George Bernard Shaw and became friends with Karl Marx’s son-in-law. Some twenty
years later her husband left for Italy for the sake of his health. He didn’t
take his wife with him, recovered his health, and managed to live for another 20 years, never meeting
her again. Apparently, he had seen a look in her eye he did not like. At the
age of 80, she emigrated to America where she married again and became Lena
Sheehy. Somerset Maugham wrote in his Writer’s Notebook that H.B. Irving had
been a neighbour of hers in 1907. When Irving discovered her identity and
confronted her with the knowledge, she is reported to have said of L’Angelier’s
murder that, yes, she did it. ‘And what’s more… I’d do it again.’
She died in New York at the age of 92.
In later years, Blythswood Square became a notorious haunt for
prostitutes. The buildings diagonally to the left of Madeleine Smith's
old home at Blythwood Square was, until relatively recently, the RAC Club hotel with
a gym and swimming pool in the basement. A friend of mine had a girlfriend who was lifeguard there in the early 90s. Some nights she finished at midnight
and he would wait outside for her. He was young at the time, innocent and
boyishly pretty, and when the expensive looking car with the business man in
the driver's seat pulled in - after having already passed a couple of times - he
thought the man must be lost and looking for directions. Needless to say, my
friend had been shocked, shocked and outraged, to find the man had thought he
was a rent boy and it was a pick-up. And what had happened? 'Ha!' he'd said,
concluding his story. 'Easiest thirty-quid I ever made.'
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