While researching my book Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era, I frequently found myself chasing a story that never quite resolved itself, and that consequently didn’t make it into the book. But I like some of them, so I’m posting them here. Be warned: they’re intriguing rather than satisfactory…
Countess Flora Sztaray, the only daughter of one of Hungary’s richest men, was married in Eastbourne in 1901, but the union was not a happy one. She discovered – alas, too late – that there was a strain of insanity in her husband’s family stretching back six generations, and she was eventually granted a divorce after he attempted to kill her. (He died in an asylum.) Nonetheless, she was independently wealthy and, now in her mid-forties and reverting to her maiden name, she remained one of the leading lights of Eastbourne society.
And then she became known to a wider public when a policeman, 46-year-old Parade Inspector Arthur Walls, was murdered on her property early one evening in October 1912. Walls had responded to a report of a man seen acting suspiciously outside Sztaray’s house; by the time he arrived, the intruder who had climbed up to the portico above the front door; Walls challenged him and was shot dead.
A 28-year-old man now known as John Williams (he was born George Mackay in Edinburgh) was arrested and charged with murder.
Williams was certainly a criminal, with a record that stretched from petty theft at the age of nine through to a twelve-month sentence for housebreaking two years back. But the case against him this time was very thin. There was an allegation by a friend of his, a former medical student named Edgar Power, that Williams had boasted of committing the crime. There was some primitive and inconclusive ballistics evidence. And – billed as the prosecution’s trump card – there was a witness statement by Williams’s pregnant girlfriend saying that she’d helped him dispose of the murder weapon. She withdrew that statement on the first day of the trial, saying that Power had tricked her into giving it.
Nonetheless, the jury, under heavy direction from the judge, took just seventeen minutes to return a guilty verdict. Despite appeals, new evidence and a petition to the home secretary calling for clemency, John Williams was hanged in January 1913.
It was known as the Case of the Hooded Man, because the police had taken great care to cover Williams’s head as he was taken into and out of court, so that he might not be identified. No reason was ever proffered for this concealment. Nor was there any explanation of the papers that Williams handed to the magistrate during his committal hearing, of which no further mention was made. Nor of the letter that the defence counsel produced in court before putting it aside with the words: ‘I wish I dare read it.’
The police and prosecution argued that this was a burglary that had been interrupted, but that didn’t ring true. Surely a professional burglar would not try to rob a house at 7 o’clock in the evening, when he knew it to be occupied by its mistress and her servants.
Williams, who protested his innocence to the last, had an alternative suggestion. ‘Whoever did that,’ he said, ‘did it to get to [Countess Sztaray’s] papers for political purposes. No doubt she is mixed up in some foreign political business. I would not commit a crime like that.’ It was an unlikely allegation, but tales of foreign agents were popular in the years running up the Great War. Perhaps Williams thought it might sway a juryman or two. Perhaps he believed it.
There was a third interpretation, offered by John Bull, a weekly paper edited by the thoroughly disreputable financier, Liberal MP and scandalmonger Horatio Bottomley.
While Williams was in the condemned cell, awaiting his appeal hearing, John Bull revealed that he and his false friend Edgar Power had together visited the journal’s London office before the murder happened. They had brought with them sworn statements from various young men ‘who had fallen victims to the depraved and vicious habits of a well-known Member of Parliament’. These young men now wanted their revenge and had enlisted Williams and Power to help ‘drive the man out of Parliament’. Alternatively, they’d settle for him making ‘some proper compensation to his victims’.
Horatio Bottomley concluded that the two men were part of ‘a dangerous gang of blackmailers’ and chose not to publish the allegations, though he insisted that there was truth in ‘the whole sordid, terrible story’. He didn’t identify the MP in question, only saying that he was a ‘wealthy and degenerate representative of an important English constituency’. He was referred to as the Hooded MP, linking the allegations of homosexuality to the murder in Eastbourne.
Over the next few weeks, John Bull kept on coming back to the story. There were dark suggestions of sodomy (hints of facts about the MP’s victims ‘which could be known to a medical man only’) and a repeated threat to name names. ‘Just imagine a man – or should we not say a beast – of the kind we have described, sitting in judgement upon White Slave traffickers, and legislating for their punishment! Should he not be given a taste of the whip which he has made for others, not more depraved than himself?’
Bottomley wrote to the Speaker of the House of Commons, enclosing a sealed envelope with the man’s name inside, but the envelope was returned unopened.
John Bull then struck a new, sorrowful tone. ‘We are sorry for the wretch. He has paid heavily for his depravity, and his life at present must be a hell on earth.’ There was only one course of action now left open to him: ‘He must at the earliest opportunity, and in any case not later than the next general election, leave the House – and in the meantime he must lead a clean life.’
And then, in February 1913, the paperannounced that the MP had indeed decided to resign his seat at the next general election. Since no one knew his identity, the report could hardly be verified, and there the story died, having run its course.
It is perfectly possible that Horatio Bottomley made up the whole thing. It would certainly not have beneath him.
And yet, if it were true, it did make some sort of sense. According to John Bull, Williams, Power and a third man, Arthur Baun, had visited the Hooded MP’s house in September 1912, the month before the murder, with the intention of extorting £50,000 from him. That attempt had been thwarted when he refused to meet them. They had subsequently tried to sell their story, but even John Bull had turned them away – unsurprisingly, perhaps, if they had their minds fixed on such large sums.
But then, within a few weeks, Williams had been charged with a murder he almost certainly didn’t commit.Meanwhile, Baun was charged with theft, for which he was sentenced to three years’ penal servitude and deportation, and Power had turned ‘copper’s nark’. If there had been a story of an MP having sex with young men, it had very effectively been silenced.
see also:
Lion & Unicorn 