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The first affordable quality books for a mass audience were brought out by Penguin nearly eighty years ago. And while much has changed since then, the way we read books is only now becoming different. Sometimes it is still only a hardback or paperback book that will do. But at other times we prefer to read on something either more portable – a dedicated reading device or our smart mobile phone – or more connected, such as a tablet or a computer.
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The two trials presented in this book are taken from Penguin’s Famous Trials series. The nine original volumes in this series were first published between 1941 and 1964, each containing accounts of the most notorious and intriguing criminal trials of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Each account had been expertly reconstructed by an editor into a seamless but highly detailed narrative, drawing on court transcripts, as well as the experience of the participating judges, lawyers and witnesses. Many of these accounts first appeared as part of The Notable British Trials Series, and were then abridged by its founder, Harry Hodge, for inclusion in Famous Trials. After his death in 1947, his son James Hodge succeeded him as editor of both series.
The Famous Trials have continued to grip readers in the decades since. In 1984 Penguin published a single-volume collection of Famous Trials, selected and introduced by John Mortimer, and in 1994 Penguin reissued the series in full. In this digital edition, two of the very best Famous Trials stories have been selected, introduced and further abridged by criminal barrister and author Alex McBride to provide modern readers with the most compelling versions yet of these courtroom classics.
Alex McBride is a criminal barrister. His book Defending the Guilty: Truth and Lies in the Criminal Courtroom was shortlisted for the 2010 Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction and is available in Penguin. He has written for the Guardian, Independent, Prospect and New Statesman, and has contributed to various BBC programmes, including From Our Own Correspondent.
George Orwell in his famous essay The Decline of the English Murder puts the golden age of British homicide roughly between 1850 and 1925. He sets the scene in the opening paragraph: we’re between the wars and the ‘murder-fancier’ – suburban, filled to the gunwales with roast beef and Yorkshire pudding – stretches out on the sofa and, pipe a-glow, swings open the News of the World. He wants to read about murder, a specific sort of murder and the News of the World, knowing its market, does not disappoint.
The murderer will be a professional man, solicitor or dentist, suffocatingly respectable, harbouring a covert passion for his secretary but desperate to avoid the scandal of divorce and, more unattractively, the loss of his wife’s private income. He plans her demise with brilliant precision, poison is a favourite, but a tiny unforeseeable detail leads the police to his door, and him to the hangman’s noose.
Here, taken from Penguin’s Famous Trials series, are two classic true accounts of spousal disappointment. The first perfectly follows the story beats of the Orwell–News of the World murder template. The killer, Herbert Rowse Armstrong, is a solicitor in the town of Hay-on-Wye, married to a woman with private means, and held in respect by his community.
There is a tear in this cosy picture. Armstrong’s wife is a shrew. She breaks up tennis games mid-set and refuses to let him drink alcohol. When she goes to an asylum to recover from a nervous breakdown, Armstrong gets a taste of what life could be like without her. On her return, he slowly and carefully poisons her to death. Armstrong gets away with it but in a horrifying twist from Orwell’s story template we discover that he’s got a liking for murder and is beginning to poison his business rival.
The second story subverts Orwell entirely. The setting is a villa in Bournemouth. Alma Rattenbury is a three-times-married thirty-eight-year-old American. Her British husband is twenty-nine years her senior. Theirs has become a marriage of convenience. Alma wants to live life but her husband slumps in an armchair all day. She advertises for a ‘willing lad’ for housework. Seventeen-year-old George Stoner gets the job and quickly becomes her lover. Alma takes George on sprees to London. It’s the perfect set-up: a well-disposed husband and a passionate lover. The tragedy is that George Stoner destroys it all when he decides to get the husband out of the way.
The story of Rattenbury and Stoner, brilliantly written up by F. Tennyson Jesse, is a bizarre but touching love story played out before the backdrop of a capital trial where, despite the risks, the defendant-lovers refuse to condemn each other. Reading these accounts, we see how human relations defy even Orwell’s categorization. The three defendants, in their different ways, confound our expectations of how murderers are meant to proceed, and it is that which makes their stories so riveting.
The little town of Hay in Brecon lies pleasantly just over the Welsh border along the right bank of the River Wye, surrounded in the near distance by such wild hills as Hay Bluff, Lord Hereford’s Knob and the Brecon Beacons. It is a sunny, quaint little place, with irregular, old-fashioned houses and a broad High Street pleasantly lending itself to gossip and the observation of other people’s affairs; and behind its quiet gardens, with an endless ripple and chime, runs the river in broad and shining reaches.
The legal business of the town and of the farmers in the neighbouring countryside was, in the year 1906, when this story opens, conducted by two firms of solicitors (both of old standing), whose offices faced one another across the main street. The head of one firm was Mr Cheese and of the other Mr Griffiths. In 1906 came Mr Herbert Rowse Armstrong as managing clerk to Mr Cheese. He was thirty-seven years of age, but had been admitted a solicitor in 1895, and had been in partnership and practising on his own account for over two years in Newton Abbot, his native town, as well as in Liverpool. Although of humble origin, he had been carefully educated by two maiden aunts, who, at some sacrifice, had enabled him to attend the University of Cambridge, where he graduated MA. He had worked hard in Newton Abbot and in Liverpool, and had saved, or got, enough money to put capital into Mr Cheese’s business and to become a partner very soon after his arrival in Hay. And very soon after that Mr Cheese and his wife both died, leaving Armstrong in sole possession of the business. A year later Armstrong married a Miss Katherine Mary Friend, and in 1907 brought her to live in a little house in the delightful coombe called Cusop Dingle, within half a mile of Hay, where many of the inhabitants have villas. Three years later he moved to a larger house a few hundred yards away called Mayfield – a house with a fairly large garden. During these years the three children of this marriage were born. In it they all lived until Mrs Armstrong died, and was carried from it to Cusop Churchyard in February 1921; and until Armstrong was arrested on the last day of the same year.