The Poisonous Solicitor

The True Story of a 1920s Murder Mystery

Stephen Bates

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781785788185
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

'METICULOUSLY RESEARCHED... A GLORIOUSLY ENGAGING ROMP' JANICE HALLETT, THE SUNDAY TIMES 'IMMERSIVE AND COMPELLING' DAVID KYNASTON 'A PAGE-TURNER' ROBERT LACEY 'CAREFUL AND COMPELLING' KATE MORGAN 'YOU WILL READ IT IN ONE SITTING' MARC MULHOLLAND 'A REAL-LIFE GOLDEN-AGE CRIME NOVEL' SEAN O'CONNOR
A brilliant narrative investigation into the 1920s case that inspired Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham. On a bleak Tuesday morning in February 1921, 48-year-old Katharine Armstrong died in her bedroom on the first floor of an imposing Edwardian villa overlooking the rolling hills of the isolated borderlands between Wales and England.Within fifteen months of such a sad domestic tragedy, her husband, Herbert Rowse Armstrong, would be arrested, tried and hanged for poisoning her with arsenic, the only solicitor ever to be executed in England.Armstrong's story was retold again and again, decade after decade, in a thousand newspaper articles across the world, and may have also inspired the new breed of popular detective writers seeking to create a cunning criminal at the centre of their thrillers.With all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, the case is a near-perfect whodunnit. But who, in fact, did it? Was Armstrong really a murderer?One hundred years after the execution, Agatha-Award shortlisted Stephen Bates examines and retells the story of the case, evoking the period and atmosphere of the early 1920s, and questioning the fatal judgement.

1

CHAPTER ONE

‘I’ll build a stairway to Paradise,
With a new step every day.’

Lyrics by Ira Gershwin,
a hit for the Paul Whiteman Band in 1922

On a bleak Tuesday morning in February 1921, a middle-aged woman named Katharine Armstrong died in her bedroom on the first floor of an imposing Edwardian villa overlooking the green fields and rolling hills of the isolated borderlands between Wales and England. Her last coherent words as she lay paralysed and terrified, five hours before her death, according to the nurse looking after her, were: ‘I am not going to die, am I, because I have everything to live for – my children and my husband.’

It was a sad end for a woman who was only 48 years old, apparently happily married and with three school-aged children, but no more remarkable, seemingly, or tragic than the recent deaths of hundreds of thousands of young men in the trenches of the First World War which had ended a little over two years earlier, or thousands more men, women and children who had died in the influenza pandemic which had followed. It was a tragedy only for her children and her husband, who had just gone to work, cadging a lift with the local doctor who had been treating her for gastritis, inflammation of the kidneys and possible heart problems – all manageable conditions – for the previous eighteen months or so. 2

Within three days she was buried in the local churchyard at Cusop, the hamlet just outside Hay-on-Wye where the couple lived, and where her husband Herbert was a long-established and well-liked solicitor, magistrates’ clerk, a churchwarden and a pillar of the local Freemasons’ lodge: the very definition of respectability.

‘The best and truest wife has gone to the Great Beyond and I am left without a partner and without a friend,’ he allegedly wailed to an acquaintance.1 But despite an obituary in the local Brecon and Radnor Express under the headline ‘A Popular Hay Lady’, there were few mourners: Herbert and the Chicks, as it said on the card attached to the family’s wreath; Dr Tom Hincks, the local GP and his wife; Mrs Griffiths and her son Trevor from the rival solicitors’ firm in the town and Emily Pearce, the Armstrongs’ housekeeper. Few other people in Hay paid much attention.

Yet, within fifteen months of such a sad domestic tragedy, Herbert Rowse Armstrong would be arrested, tried and hanged for her murder, the only solicitor ever to be executed in England, certainly in modern times. The domestic tragedy in a remote corner of the country became an international media sensation and a distraction from the world’s other news. The loving husband would become a villain of the age, one of the most notorious figures of the 1920s. A dapper, punctilious, little man with a waxed moustache who usually wore gilt-rimmed pince-nez spectacles, he would become more than a murderer at the centre of a case that the judge at his trial described in strangulated judicial syntax as ‘so deeply interesting that I doubt whether any of us have in recollection a case so remarkable’. He would, in fact, become an archetype: a member of the professional classes who had unaccountably turned bad and been caught out by a simple slip.

Armstrong was the cunning figure whose story was retold again and again, decade after decade, in a thousand Sunday newspaper articles in Britain, Australia and the United States, but also the 3basic model and maybe inspiration for the new breed of popular detective writers seeking to create a clever criminal at the centre of their thrillers. Authors such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, Margery Allingham and Georgette Heyer, whose plots revolved around subtle murders, devious minds and ingenious solutions: the obscure but fatal clues that ensnared the killer who thought he’d got away with it.

Readers anxious to escape their own humdrum lives, as Herbert Armstrong could not, into a world where problems could be wished away and difficulties unravelled, were starting to buy such novels in large quantities. They could spot the clues and work out the mysteries for themselves, playing amateur detectives, according to the strict conventions of the genre. Christie’s first crime novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which introduced the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, was published in 1921 and Sayers’s first effort, Whose Body?, featuring her hero Lord Peter Wimsey, came out in 1923. Crime paid both for publishers – less so for novelists – and also for newspapers. Editors always knew that sensational murders with their precipitous cliff-hanging outcomes boosted circulation – would the accused hang within weeks or would they escape the noose?

As so often, George Orwell put it best in his essay, ‘Decline of the English Murder’, written in 1946. He pictures an ordinary chap between the wars, relaxing with the News of the World spread out on his lap after a heavy Sunday lunch: ‘roast beef and Yorkshire or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about? Naturally, about a murder…

‘What would be, from a News of the World reader’s point of view, the “perfect” murder? The murderer should be a little man 4of the professional class – a dentist or a solicitor, say – living an intensely respectable life somewhere in the suburbs and preferably in a semi-detached house … He should be either chairman of the local Conservative Party branch, or a leading Nonconformist and strong Temperance advocate … Having decided on murder, he should plan it all with the utmost cunning, and only slip up over some tiny unforeseeable detail. The means chosen should, of course, be poison … a crime can have dramatic and even tragic qualities which make it memorable and excite pity for both victim and murderer.’

The recipe fits Armstrong to a T, indeed he gets a mention in the essay. Apart from some well-deployed red herrings, it must have been the case of the Hay-on-Wye Poisoner that Orwell was thinking about as he wrote. He was a fussy man of the professional class, a solicitor indeed, highly respectable, certainly voted Conservative and, though not a Nonconformist or an abstainer, was a regular churchgoer. And the tiny, unforeseeable detail was the little packet of arsenic he carried in his tweed gardening jacket.

Was he, though, a murderer? Precious few of the newspaper-reading public would have thought he was innocent in 1922 after they read the extensive and prejudicial coverage of his case. But many who knew him, in his own household, among the servants, his clients, the people of Hay-on-Wye, his close friends and the lawyers who represented him refused to believe he could be guilty. ‘He was a good master and a sympathetic friend,’ said his clerk Arthur Phillips. ‘That Armstrong who was hanged at Gloucester was not the Armstrong that we knew,’ said the bishop of Hereford, who had known him since they were at Cambridge together.2 Some of them indeed believed he had not got a fair trial and should never have been convicted, that maybe he was the sacrificial victim of another trial eighteen months earlier, which had had a very different outcome. But in 1922, there could be no reversal of fortune and there 5would be no reprieve. Mostly though, the world convicted him: after all, he had been subjected to a prolonged trial in the British legal system which everyone knew to be the best in the world. He himself would have thought so.

Hay-on-Wye sits so exactly on the border between Wales and England, at the confluence of the River Wye and the Dulas Brook, that the town is half in Wales, while Cusop, the hamlet where the Armstrongs lived half a mile down the road, is in England. For centuries it was disputed land, the scene of periodic skirmishes and battles and it remains presided over by an ancient castle. Sitting roughly halfway between Hereford, Brecon and Builth Wells and surrounded by the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains to the south and the Radnor Forest and the Cambrian Mountains to the north, by Hay Bluff and the picturesquely named Lord Hereford’s Knob, Hay then as now was at the centre of an agricultural area. In the early 1920s the outlying farms and villages operated much as their inhabitants had for centuries, living in remote and ancient farmhouses, well off the beaten track. They drew their water from ground springs and their lighting from candles and hurricane lamps. Electricity would not reach the Golden Valley south of Hay for another 40 years.3 There were few telephones, even in towns, though the Armstrongs had one at home. Cattle and sheep were driven down the valleys and through the streets of Hay on market days, and there was a slaughterhouse owned by a local butcher right in the centre, directly opposite the castle. Horses brought down from outlying farms in the hills were led to the local railway station for transportation to the coalmines in south Wales for an underground life as pit ponies.

Home to about 2,000 people, as it still is today, the town was so situated between the hills as to be ‘pleasantly lending itself to 6gossip and the observation of other people’s affairs’, wrote Alexander Filson Young in his account of the trial in the 1920s.4 Long before the international book festival, which now brings 80,000 visitors to the town for a fortnight each spring to hear best-selling novelists, television personalities and former American presidents, Hay was off the beaten track. Indeed the surrounding area was literally so, as some of the local farms in the foothills of the Beacons were not connected to even gravelled roads and could only be reached on foot or by horseback. Such visitors who came were either staying for the fishing, or passing through on the way to somewhere else. The Wye Valley Times in September 1919 spoke of a Land of Afternoon: ‘Crowds in the real sense do not exist here. If the entire population of visitors in all the miles between Chepstow and … Plynlimon were to be seized and deported to a great seaside resort their arrival would hardly be noticed.

‘Great grey chars-a-bancs from Glamorganshire coast towns do not linger. The atmosphere of the Wye is unattractive to motorists of every class – a little too drowsy and besides there is nowhere for them to stay. The whole Wye valley does not contain a single large modern hotel. The Wye still belongs to the 19th century. It is always afternoon here – Sunday afternoon. This is a happy hunting ground for those who still impel that late Victorian instrument: the “push bike”.’5

The Welsh border was in a part of the country where the 1920s were not yet roaring – nor would they ever do so. It was not a society of the fast set, of weekend country house parties, or of louche and bohemian values. There might have been village dances, and tennis and bridge parties, but ‘jass’ as played on wind-up gramophones would have been frowned upon by respectable folk. As for modern dancing, the Charleston and the Black Bottom had yet to be invented and would not reach the Wye Valley for years. It is to be doubted that Modernism, the arts movement of Picasso and 7Matisse, of Le Corbusier and Ezra Pound, had reached the Golden Valley except perhaps to be laughed at in philistine magazines such as Punch.

Katharine Armstrong played the piano well at Mayfield, the family’s villa in Cusop, until nephritis seized up her fingers, but ragtime would not have been her scene. Did people in Hay who could afford a gramophone play the latest jazz shellac records? ‘My Man’ was the biggest hit of 1922 in America, France, Italy and Britain and its lyrics certainly give a flavour of the attitudes of the time:

He’s not much for looks

He’s no hero out of books

But I love him, yes I love him

Two or three girls has he

That he likes as well as me

But I love him

I don’t know why I should

He isn’t true

He beats me too

What can I do

Oh, my man I love him so

He’ll never know

All my life is just despair

But I don’t care …

Or was it Al Jolson, or the Paul Whiteman Orchestra playing ‘I’ll Bui...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• Chapter Twenty
• Chapter Twenty-One
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright