Detour No 4... St George's Road and West Princess Street...

As found on Top 40 Glasgow blogs at https://blog.feedspot.com/glasgow_blogs/

Oscar Slater before his arrest and after.

            The final case in Jack House's book is that of Oscar Slater. Slater was a German Jew who spent 19 years in prison and was very nearly hanged for the murder of Miss Mary Gilchrist which he certainly never committed. The murder took place on the 21^st December 1908 at 51 West Princess Street, just off St. George’s Street and about 5 minutes’ walk from Charing Cross.

51 West Princess Street as it is and as it was.

Mary Gilchrist was 83 years-old and afraid of burglars. She had told her downstairs neighbours that, if ever she needed help, she would knock down to them. On the evening of her death the neighbours were in their dining room when they heard three knocks. Was that the signal? Arthur Adams was persuaded by his sisters to go upstairs and check. He rang several times but got no answer. He went back downstairs. But one sister was certain something was wrong and told him to go back. He did, and as he stood at the door listening, he heard footsteps behind him. It was Miss Gilchrist’s maid, Nellie Lambie. She had been out for the evening newspaper. He waited till she opened the door and as she went into the kitchen a man appeared at the bedroom door to the right. He walked up to Adams as if to speak to him, brushed past and rushed down the stairs. Nellie Lambie showed no surprise and Adams guessed she knew the man. When he asked where Miss Gilchrist was, Lambie went into the dining room and screamed. The old woman was in front of the fireplace with a rug thrown over her head, the floor covered in blood. Adams ran after the man who had passed him.

When Adams returned, he found that Nellie Lambie had called a policeman. They removed the rug. Although Miss Gilchrist had been battered over the head she was still breathing. Adams ran for a doctor but by the time the doctor arrived the old woman was dead.

A rudimentary search discovered a jewellery box which had been smashed open with some jewellery strew around beside it. When asked if anything was missing, Lambie said a diamond brooch was gone. When asked about the man who had run off, Lambie said she hardly saw him and Adams didn’t get a very clear look at his face because he had left his glasses downstairs. Pawn shops were alerted to be on the look-out for the brooch.

The hallway of Miss Gilchrist's flat.

The man who ran off was described as between 25-30, 5 feet 8 or 9 inches, slim, dark hair, clean shaven, dressed in a light grey overcoat and dark cloth cap. Adams said the man appeared to be a gentleman. The police worked on the theory that Miss Gilchrist knew her killer otherwise it would have been impossible for him to enter the flat and kill her in the ten minutes the servant was gone for an evening paper.

A further odd detail of the case was that Miss Gilchrist had thousands of pounds worth of jewellery hidden all over the house, some of which were fastened behind curtains, wrapped in bed sheets, and in the pocket of clothes in her wardrobe. The police wondered if Nellie Lambie knew of this and, if so, might she have mentioned it to a boyfriend?

The Glasgow public were outraged that an elderly woman might be killed in her own home in the 10 minutes that a maid was out of the house. The newspapers put pressure on the police to find the killer quickly. A reward was offered for information. On Christmas Eve, a 14-year-old message girl turned up who claimed to have had a good view of the man Arthur Adams had seen. Her description was so different from Adams that rather than dismiss the girl's evidence the police concluded two men must have been involved. The second man was described as tall, with a nose turned to one side, perhaps the right side, she thought. He wore a fawn coloured overcoat, dark trousers, a tweed cloth cap and brown boats.

    On Christmas Day, a bicycle dealer and gambler told the police that a German Jew called Oscar was trying to sell a pawn ticket for a diamond brooch. He didn't know Oscar's address but knew the building and close-entrance and showed them to it. It was 400 yards from Miss Gilchrist’s flat.

Oscar Slater was a gambler and dealer in jewellery, most of which he had received in lieu of gambling debts. He lived at 69 St. George’s Road with his girlfriend Andrée Junio Antoine. Antoine was also a prostitute who received callers during the day when Slater was out. When the police called on Slater they discovered he and his girlfriend had left Glasgow that same day for Liverpool to catch the Lusitania to New York.

'They're on the run!' concluded the police.

Even when it was discovered that the brooch he had pawned had no connection with Miss Gilchrist and, in fact, had been pawned over a month before the woman was murdered, the 'fact' that he had gone ‘on the run’ with his girlfriend and that they were travelling under the false names of Mr and Mrs Sando told the police they were guilty. Slater, it later developed, had changed his name because his ex-wife had tracked him down and was after him for money he didn’t have, something she had frequently done before.

He was arrested on docking at New York on January the 2^nd 1909. Slater had no need to go back to Scotland to face a trial. The brooch ‘clue’ was the only thing that had drawn the police to Slater and was worthless, having no connection with the murder. Slater’s American representative felt the same about the ‘identification’ of him as the suspect. The Glasgow police had brought Arthur Adams, Nellie Lambie, and the message girl, to New York to identify Slater. When they first saw Slater he was handcuffed between two New York cops, one of whom wore a badge of identification, the other of whom was very tall, with Slater in the middle, looking very much the prisoner. ‘Is that the man?’ the Glasgow policeman asked the women, pointing to Slater. ‘That’s the man!’ they said.

Slater rejected his attorney's advice and was determined to go back to Scotland and prove his innocence.

The police made a great deal of Slater being in a hurry to leave Glasgow. He had been in no hurry, though. His plans to leave for America had been ongoing since the 7^th of December. He had been to America before and was going again because he had the opportunity to run a gambling club in San Francisco. At his trial, the evidence against Slater had no substance but the Lord Advocate was determined to prove his guilt despite all evidence to the contrary, and no matter how legitimate or illegitimate the 'evidence' might be. A fantasy journey was concocted for Slater between a billiard hall in Renfield Street - where the Odeon cinema now sits - and Miss Gilchrist’s flat, with no witnesses produced who saw him make the journey. A very real witness to his whereabout was not called by the prosecution and, as the defence were told nothing of this witness, neither could they call him either. It was, in modern parlance, a stitch-up.

The Lord-Advocate of the trial was described as a man never troubled by doubts or difficulties, or considerations of the other side’s strength. For him, there was no other side. He was what psychologists term, a 'Right' man, that is, a man who always needs to be right and find it inconceivable that he could ever be wrong. ‘He could not see that any other view than his was possible.’ At the start of his summation he told the jury it would be shown in his argument how Oscar Slater came to learn of the old woman’s jewellery - then he never mentioned the jewellery again. He made an attempt to explain how Slater got into the flat of a woman terrified of burglars, with a double-locked door, and a close-door which needed to be opened by Miss Gilchrist by a handle mechanism upstairs in her flat. He also said Slater was ‘gasping and panting for money’ and had made a ‘flight from justice’ after his name and description had appeared in the newspaper. But Slater had £30 on him when he left Glasgow, a sizable amount for the time, and his name had never appeared in any newspaper. The Lord-Advocate spoke for two long-winded hours. Then it was the prosecution’s turn. The prosecutor spoke of Slater’s lifestyle, that he was ‘the ruin of men… the ruin of women… We do not know whether he ever did an honest day’s work in his life.’ A decent man, said the prosecutor, might be presumed innocent until proven guilty but in Slater’s case that presumption might be dispensed with given his lifestyle.

Slater was sentenced to be hanged. The people of Glasgow doubted the verdict and 20,000 of them singed a petition for the commutation of his sentence. After some debate on the case, Slater’s sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life.

He was told of this two days before he was due to be executed.

In 1910, William Roughead published a book entitled The Trial of Oscar Slater detailing the faults of the case against Slater. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took up Slater’s case, but more importantly, and unknown to Slater, a Glasgow policeman who believed Slater to be innocent was ready to prove it, to the detriment of his career, pension, and ultimately his life. He was Detective Lieutenant John Thomas Trench. Trench had been involved in Slater’s case from the beginning. According to him, Nellie Lambie knew and named the man who ran from the flat that night, a man also known to Miss Gilchrist. But after the brooch led the police to Slater, Trench’s superiors dropped every other avenue of enquiry. Trench was a conscientious cop. He presented his doubts to the Scottish Secretary. The Scottish Secretary asked Trench to present the written details of his evidence. A secret enquiry was undertaken. And it was a farce.

Trench stated that he had interviewed Miss Gilchrist’s niece who told him that, on the night of the murder, Nellie Lambie had come to her door in a very excited state, told her that Miss Gilchrist had been murdered and said, ‘I saw the man who did it.’ She identified him, but his name was removed from the report and the initials A.B. inserted. Trench also noted that Lambie could not identify a sketch of Oscar Slater and said she did not know the man. As for the message girl who provided evidence, Trench had proof that she was not where she said she had been so could not have seen anyone run from the murder scene. The problem was that Miss Gilchrist’s niece later denied Nellie Lambie had mentioned A.B. to her. And she had good reason for the denial. The man was her cousin.

Everyone called to the enquiry contradicted Trench or denied what he said. He was suspended from duty. He invoked the protection of the Scottish Secretary who had asked for his report but Trench was dismissed from the Glasgow police.

Trench.

When war broke out in 1914, Trench joined the Army despite being 45 years-old. He was to leave with his regiment in 1915 when the Glasgow police called at his barracks and arrested him on a fraudulent charge of resetting stolen jewellery, arresting his lawyer on the same charge. The Lord-Justice summed up the shifty-evidence and directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty. Trench re-joined his regiment in Egypt, left the Army in 1918 and died the following year, aged 50. His lawyer died two years later. It is said both of them were deeply upset over the nature of their arrest and trial under false charges, seemingly as revenge for their questioning of the Slater case.

A journalist friend of Trench’s took up the case and, 8 years later, published at Arthur Conan Doyle’s instigation The Truth about Oscar Slater. William Park’s book stated that the man who killed Miss Gilchrist was ‘on intimate terms’ with her and that the servant also knew him. He was after a document which she possessed - her will. The crime writer Edgar Wallace reviewed the book and wrote that it was made obvious that not only had Nellie Lambie known the killer but he had been in the house before she went for the newspaper. Many newspapers took up renewed interest in the case to the embarrassment of the Glasgow police and the Scottish judicial system.  It was said that an Old Bailey jury would have stopped the case halfway through. ‘… anybody but a fool might know he was guiltless,’ wrote Wallace.

In 1927, the Empire News produced a statement from Nellie Lambie in which she stated she knew the man who ran. She had told the police but they said she was talking nonsense and pressured her to identify Slater. In another newspaper, Mary Barrowman, the 14-year-old message girl, now a middle-aged woman, said the Procurator Fiscal rehearsed her evidence for two weeks. The Secretary of State for Scotland said Slater would be released but the press were not happy claiming this was a measure to avoid an enquiry into the whole case. The Scottish authorities, from the Secretary of State down to the constables who denied Trench’s evidence, compounded their culpability in the miscarriage of justice by continuing to cover up their failings to the bitter end. Oscar Slater was finally released 4 days later. He had been in prison for 19 years.

Despite being a free man, Slater was still determined to prove his innocence. An appeal in the case of Oscar Slater against His Majesty’s Advocate was held in 1928. But Slater was told he would not be allowed to give evidence, at which he was incensed and threatened to call off the appeal. Persuaded by friends to continue, he left the case in the hands of his advisors. Nellie Lambie was in the United States and refused to attend and she could not be forced to do so. The five judges hearing the appeal, reluctantly, very reluctantly, as is evident from their comments, quashed Slater’s conviction, but only on a technicality. Slater was awarded £6000, roughly £315 for every year in prison. Adjusted for inflation this is the equivalent of £373,807 in 2019 terms. Out of that, Slater had to pay his legal fees. He also sent £200 to William Park, author of The Truth about Oscar Slater.
Slater died in 1948 at the age of 75.

Slater after his release.

Many years after the trial, the message girl finally confessed that she had not been in West Princess Street the night of the murder, but her mother was an alcoholic and had wanted a share of the reward. She had received £100 for her evidence.

            Jack House had his own theory as to what had happened that night long ago. Miss Gilchrist’s background becomes relevant. She was on bad terms with all her relatives. Her father had left her a large sum of money which had led to family quarrels. Miss Gilchrist had an illegitimate daughter which her family knew of and she planned to leave all her money to her daughter and grand-daughter. Despite the fact that the family were already well-off, they wanted the will changed in order that they might get a share of her money, rather than have it go to some bastard child. Two men, believes House, called on her that night, both relatives – Dr. Charteris and Austin Birrell. Dr. Charteris was a nephew of Miss Gilchrist and later became a professor at St Andrew’s University. House believes he was certainly the man that passed Adams on the stairs… but not the murderer.  A nephew of Birrell’s told House, ‘the whole family knew that Uncle Austin had done the murder’. He had been arguing with Miss Gilchrist over her will when he struck her. She had fallen and hit her head. Then Birrell seized a nearby chair and repeatedly beat her over the head and chest with it until the doorbell rang. While he had been killing the old woman, Charteris was looking for the document. When  Adams left the front door the first time, Birrell left the flat. By the time Adams and Lambie arrived, Charteris had found the document and strolled past them. Both men then ran along West Princess Street but were not seen by Mary Barrowman because she wasn’t there. However, they were seen by schoolteacher Agnes Brown, but she was not called by the prosecution because her evidence contradicted Mary Bannerman’s and Bannerman was willing to identify Oscar Slater. The police had called on Charteris and Birrell to tell them of the murder. They appeared shocked and said they knew nothing about it. The weren’t questioned any further. Why should they be? They were both respectable gentlemen. Respectability was the key to all the murders, House believes. Madeleine Smith was the respectable daughter of a respectable man, while L'Angelier was a French adventurer. Pritchard was a respectable medical man, above suspicion, as was Old Fleming. And who was Oscar Slater? A Jewish gambler with a girlfriend who was a prostitute. House concludes that the respectability of the Glasgow police also had to be protected at all costs. They closed ranks against Trench, the man House calls the real hero of the Slater case, a man who risked and lost everything for the sake of an innocent man and a wrongful conviction he attempted to right.

Professor Charteris is front row, second from left.

            A few years ago, a new pub opened on St George’s Street called the Oscar Slater. It wasn’t far from West Princess Street where the murder took place and was under the flat where Oscar Slater had lived. I spent a very pleasant afternoon in the pub with a couple of friends. The pub walls were filled with documentation and memorabilia relating to the case. It was then that I discovered I had been in the murder house. We were talking about the Slater case, of which I knew very little. One of my friends had recently seen a documentary on the Slater case and realised that a mutual friend of ours had lived in Miss Gilchrist's flat. The flat, like almost all the others in that section of the West End had been converted into bed-sits and shared accommodation long ago. Our friend had lived there for a few years. I had not only been in the flat, I had been in the murder room without knowing it. It had been converted into a bedroom. Miss Gilchrist must be a peaceful spirit because no one complained of any ghostly activity. The Oscar Slater pub, as good as it was, didn’t last long. Pubs seldom do on that side of the motorway. It cuts them off from the business of the main section of Sauchiehall street.

Oscar Slater's.