Peterhead (6 page)

Maclean, an avid reader, noted that the books provided were selected to exclude anything to do with murder, suicide and other morbid ideas which were not healthy. This is not the case these days when prison libraries give access to the full range of the world of literature – and in some cases even DVDs of crime films, though that raises the blood pressure of the folk who think a life behind bars is overly cushy.

The quality of thought of the great socialist and a certain fair-mindedness on his part is evident in his writings at this time. His confinement ended in forced feeding and other tortures, including he claimed, drugging his food, but he could still remark that the provision of clothing, regular food, a dry bed and relatively short hours of labour was still a better life than that endured by the poor outside of the prison walls. Which is a remarkable insight into the way life was lived all these years ago.

Some of the warders, too, showed a humanitarian side and an order that prisoners were not supposed to speak to each other except in connection with their work was largely ignored. If you discounted the “scientific torture” he wrote about, he wryly remarked that twenty years in Peterhead might be better than ten years down a mine in the days when mine owners exploited their workers and thought little of their lives. In prison your “employers” did not take risks with your life to line their pockets. But it was no place for an educated and idealistic man driven by a passion to improve life for his fellows.

Maclean died young and Peterhead played a role, his physical health torn from him by the savage conditions in jail. Books, however, saved his mental health and he left a considerable legacy of socialist thinking. And one thing is for sure: John Maclean was certainly not your run-of-the-mill Peterhead con.

Those who believe that only the guilty go to jail, the sort of folk – and there are still some around today – who insist that “they wouldna be in the dock if they hadna done it” should take a look at the evidence and the statistics. Those who confidently proclaim that the English and Scottish systems of law and judgement are the finest in the world might be, in the totality of things, correct. But they are in a dream-world if they also believe that there are no innocents in jail or indeed that no innocent man ended his days dangling at the end of a rope. I remember going round Barlinnie with a recent governor, Bill McKinley, a much respected high flier in the prison service, now retired, and as we spoke to a group of inmates he remarked, “Any innocent men in here?” Many a hand shot into the air. And everyone, prisoners and visitor alike, had a quiet smile. But there was a chance that this straw poll in a jail holding some of the toughest residents of Glasgow, a city known worldwide for having a high proportion of hard men with no respect for the law, was probably not completely wrong.

Of course, you can’t always be sure. Cases of wrongful imprisonment come to light with remarkable regularity. But in this case, in Barlinnie, any con fitted up by the police or otherwise wrongly imprisoned would likely be someone with a record as long as your arm who on release would soon return, this time genuinely guilty. Such claims of innocence are a prison commonplace. I was even told by a long-term Peterhead prisoner, Walter Norval, who features elsewhere in this book, that one day a fellow convict remarked over a mug of tea, in matter-of-fact fashion, that he had not committed the offence for which he was serving time. Walter thought that if this was the case his friend should fight as hard as possible to be cleared and released. But this con was having none of it – he was prepared to do the time even if in this case he had not done the crime. He pointed out without rancour that he had escaped punishment for many a crime he HAD committed and that if he pushed the case too far the real culprit, a friend, would be arrested. This guy reasoned that he should have been in the jail anyway!

But all this minor stuff is a far cry from major miscarriages of justice that flaw the British record. Some years ago I was sent a remarkable book by Thomas Toughill that claimed to have solved the mystery of the Oscar Slater case. It had a fascinating foreword by Peter Hill, who originated in BBC TV’s
Rough Justice
programme in the late 1970s. Peterhead prison is prominent in the history of wrongful imprisonment – four of its most infamous and best-known inmates spent long years in it for crimes they did not commit – Oscar Slater, Paddy Meehan and TC Campbell and Joe Steele of the Glasgow Ice Cream War miscarriage. Maybe too the Arran Murderer Laurie, who may have been innocent. But Hill puts all that in perspective with the facts of some English wrongful imprisonments of which, as you might expect of a more populous country, there are many more. Mostly they hinge on mistaken identity, which was a major factor in the Slater and Meehan cases as well, and Hill provides some striking examples.

Adolf Beck is a name often linked with that of Slater as classic examples of witnesses mistaking identities. Beck was convicted in England for crimes committed by a George Smith, and despite Beck’s protestation that he was in the clear, a jury swallowed flawed evidence and he was convicted. But it later emerged that Smith had been circumcised but Beck hadn’t, a discovery that crushed the evidence and clearly indicated mistaken identity. This led to the conviction being overturned. At that time England had no procedure for releasing the innocent Beck, which in turn led to the creation of the English Court of Appeal. This was back in 1907. Similarly, years later, the Slater case had a role in the creation of the Scottish Court of Criminal Appeal. Oscar Slater served eighteen years in Peterhead – as convict no.1992 – breaking rocks in the prison quarry before being released but not officially cleared of the murder of Marion Gilchrist.

The crime that had landed Slater long years of hell was not your usual low-life Glasgow murder. Nor was he a typical Glasgow criminal. It took place a few days before Christmas of 1908 in fashionable West Princes Street in the west end of the city. This was home to many of the most prosperous folk of Scotland’s industrial capital who lived in some style, in dramatic contrast to those who lived and worked in the less salubrious east end. As the holiday approached the dull gas-lit streets were brightened a little by a few Christmas wreaths and decorations, and the brass knockers and letterboxes on the solid wood doors had an extra shine. Even the usually gloomy Glasgow weather could not dispel a sense of expectation of the Christmas and New Year celebrations, particularly the New Year, which in Scotland at the time was the more important of the two winter festivals. Miss Gilchrist fitted the area well, expensively dressed and well-connected – the newspapers of the time called her “rich,” adding an extra dimension to her killing. She was found battered to death not long after sending her maid out to buy a newspaper. The servant returned to find a neighbour at her mistress’s door who said he had been alerted by a loud thud just moments before. Suddenly, as they talked, a smartly-dressed stranger brushed past them rushing to the head of the stairs and legging it for the street, clearly determined to put as much distance between him and the flat as quickly as possible.

The maid and the neighbour then went into the dining room of the house, where they found Miss Gilchrist lying battered and badly injured. She died a short time later without giving any clue who her murderous assailant had been. The only thing that seemed to be missing was a gold and diamond brooch.

It was on the face of it a simple scenario: an opportunist robbery by some local rascal. But the way the story played out is in hindsight remarkable in several ways. First is the fact that Oscar Slater was to be fitted up as the killer by the establishment. It is astonishing to anyone looking at the case now to believe that he was involved at all and over the years evidence has emerged to confirm that almost certainly he did not even know who Marion Gilchrist was, and with complete certainty, it can be said he was not the man who ran down the stairs past her maid.

It was a high-profile case featured heavily in the press and, as happens to this day, the police were put under pressure to find a murderer who had caused a sensation in a douce part of the city where crime was not commonplace. It is the old story of the media and public opinion screeching that “something must be done” and desperate and clueless investigators clutching at any straw or hint to come out of the underworld. Such pressure on the police has caused hundreds of wrongful convictions.

The first urge is, of course, to turn to the usual suspects. But Slater was no master criminal with a long record of violence and well known to the cops. If a criminal at all, he was definitely small-time. He only came to the attention of the investigators when they were tipped off anonymously that he had tried to sell a pawn ticket for a brooch.

Now he was in their sights, the police enthusiastically probed the background of the supposed seller of the pawn ticket. Slater did not come up sparkling white under scrutiny. In fact, it would have pleased many a Glasgow citizen if he had genuinely been the killer, as it would have confirmed their prejudices. There was a lot of anti-German feeling in the city at the time and he was a German Jew with a sleazy reputation. He lived with a glamorous mistress with show business connections; he was a gambler and a jewel dealer. If anyone was looking for someone to stitch up he was, on paper, the ideal candidate. He was put into the frame, as they say, despite the fact that it was easy to prove that the jewellery sold by him had no connection with old Miss Gilchrist. This little inconvenience did not seem to deter the police one little bit – desperation to prove a theory was paramount. Or maybe there was a more sinister explanation. Do not let the facts spoil a good theory, as some journalists say.

The suspicion now is that Oscar Slater was becoming the perfect patsy in the hunt for the murderer. An ideal man for their purposes had fallen into the lap of those in high places who wanted to protect the real killer. Slater was demonised in the papers and became a hate figure to the public, who read with enthusiasm verging on voyeurism about his sleazy background. To most who followed the case the revelations of mistresses and gambling were an insight into a side of Glasgow they had never seen.

Slater did nothing to help his own case by inexplicably travelling at short notice with his mistress to New York, where he was arrested. He then returned to Scotland of his own free will, confident that no police force in the world could convict him since, apart from anything else, he had an alibi. And he had no connection with the missing brooch. It was a big mistake. An identification parade was held with witnesses who later claimed to have been prompted by the police to finger him. The trial was a farce with no solid evidence to convict him other than that dodgy ID parade. But as a hated foreigner in a strange city he was convicted both by the real court and the court of public opinion.

The identification point is interesting because for almost a hundred years this case has been pored over by criminologists and there was some evidence in their findings that Slater had a slight resemblance to one of Miss Gilchrist’s relatives. This gives credence to the theory that a family member was involved in the killing, if not the actual murderer, and that the motive was a dispute over money or a will and the stealing of the brooch a red herring.

The Gilchrist family had close contact with high society and with the top legal elite in Scotland at the time. In takes no great leap of imagination to suppose that they could be involved in a plot to frame Slater. He was granted mercy just hours before he was due to die on the gallows at Glasgow’s old Duke Street prison. That decision itself is very suspicious, giving credence to the idea that the authorities were not too worried about such a character as Oscar Slater being sentenced to years of misery in the Peterhead stone quarries but drew the line at killing an innocent man. Whatever, speculation continues even today and Thomas Toughill’s
Oscar Slater – the Mystery Solved
(Canongate, Edinburgh, 1993) is a must read however for anyone wanting a meticulous and lengthy examination of all the theories in detail.

So, instead of a sudden drop into eternity Slater was transported north to Peterhead, where he began a hard new career smashing stone in all kinds of weather, playing a part in the creation of Peterhead’s Harbour of Refuge. It was a life much different from the tiled closes and stained glass of the beautiful west end tenements and the gambling saloons and loose women of Glasgow at the turn of the last century. And Oscar Slater was not the perfect prisoner. The ache of his wrongful incarceration ate at him night and day. He constantly proclaimed his innocence, as you would do, and he showed at all times how he resented his treatment. It is said that in the prison he was on occasion involved in fights, though violence played no role in his earlier life. If he had hopes that his sentence would be reviewed after fifteen years, as sometimes happened, he was to be disappointed. The anti-German feeling after the First World War did not help but, in any case, to the public he was a largely forgotten figure.

Arthur Conan Doyle, though, was a supporter. The great writer of detective stories and, it has to be said, the man behind some eccentric flawed investigations of spiritualist phenomena, had a reputation for fighting against injustice and knew the Slater case well. He studied it for years and from the start he was clear in his mind that it was a fit-up. His concerns about the injustice of the case were shared by others at the top in journalism, the famous criminologist of the time, Thomas Roughead, and some of the police officers involved, especially a Lieutenant Trench, who was himself unjustly treated by his superiors for supporting the theories of Slater’s innocence.

The years of clamour created by Slater’s supporters resulted in the German eventually being freed from Peterhead on a technicality in 1928. But even then the authorities would not go the last mile and admit he had been framed all these years ago and he was never officially cleared of the murder. But at least the mean-minded elite had let him out of prison. On release he lived quietly in Glasgow and Ayr. Surprisingly, he was seemingly happy to stay in the country where the authorities had conspired to send him, an innocent man, to the verge of death on the gallows. Few who knew him are still with us, but one elderly man I spoke to recently, in the course of research for this book, remembered as a youngster living up the same genteel tenement close as him in Glasgow’s Shawlands. Slater, whose name will forever be linked with Peterhead, was an unlikely ex-con to his neighbours – on leaving his flat in immaculate dress he would descend the stairs on his way to the streets and whatever business he had that day. But if he passed a youngster on the way down he would stop and benignly hand him or her a wee sweetie. A far cry from prison porridge in the North-East of Scotland.