Introduction
I have always steered clear of Great Wyrley’s famous George Edalji case (1903), apart from the odd comment here and there, and there are a few good reasons for this: firstly, the story has been done to death (no pun intended); secondly, because of the arrogance and squaring off between Captain Anson (Staffordshire Chief of Police) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the real truth has been all but lost; thirdly, it still polarises people today – some passionately – especially if it is used as a vehicle by those that only see history through the lens of today instead of attempting, difficult as this is, to place it into its historical context and, finally, I think there are far more interesting things to talk about. I have, however, made an exception this time.
George Edalji in 1907, https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/
This post is in two parts with much the bigger part coming first courtesy of Tony Kulik, a good friend of this Blog and to local history as a whole in the area. Tony asked me to include an article that he had problems posting – which is an account of the case printed in the National Review in 1907, and written by J. Churton Collins; Collins’ article shows his own sympathies (e.g. while I am not saying he is in anyway wrong, the Elizabeth Foster case is not as straight forward as he makes out), but makes an interesting read for those that know little or nothing about the affair.
The Edalji family c1893 (pronounced Ee-dl-gee in George’s own words). Project Gutenberg of Australia http://gutenberg.net.au.
The article is then followed by some observations of mine, however, these observations are really looking at the legacy of the affair and not the affair itself; these have come about as I am currently writing about the Great Wyrley area during the Great War and, as a part of the pre-war scene setting, I touched upon the events of 1903 as they had come back to haunt the township in the latter months of 1913; I wanted to look at why this ‘haunting’ occurred and why it mattered so much to the Parish Council of the day.
THE NATIONAL REVIEW March 1907 – THE EDALJI CASE (via Tony Kulik)
In sketching the history of this case I may presume that Sir Arthur’s narrative, which originally appeared in the Daily Telegraph and has since been reprinted in pamphlet form, will be familiar to my readers, and I will therefore pass as lightly as possible over what he narrates with fullness and enlarge only where I can supplement from material for which presumably he had not space.
Mr. George Edalji, who was born in 1876, is the eldest son of the Rev. S. Edalji, a clergyman of the Church of England though of Parsee origin, who married an English lady. For thirty-one years Mr, Edalji has been Vicar of Great Wyrley, a village about six miles from Walsall in Staffordshire. In 1888 there lived at the vicarage, as general servant, one Elizabeth Foster, since dead, and to her were traced several offensive anonymous letters addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Edalji, together with equally offensive scribblings on walls and other places, provoked apparently by the fact that she had been dismissed from the service of the Edaljis. For this offence she was arrested and tried at Cannock in 1889, but, on her solicitor pleading that the whole thing was nothing but a foolish joke, and tendering an apology she was not punished. Two years afterwards began a second outbreak of anonymous letters, and for upwards of three years the Edaljis were persecuted by hundreds of these missives, together with a series of elaborate hoaxes, so that their lives became a burden to them. The police were called in, but no culprits or culprit could be discovered, and the persecutions in more aggravated forms continued. Disgusting or threatening letters were pushed under the doors or through the windows of the vicarage; the lawn and grounds were strewn with objects of all kinds, such as collar-studs, purses, spoons, copper coins, knives and pencils, apparently to perplex and tantalise the police. At last on December 12, 1892, a large key was found on the vicarage doorstep; it turned out that it had been stolen from Walsall Grammar School. The police, on their mettle and at their wits’ end to know what to do—for the whole neighbourhood was ridiculing and crying shame on them for their incompetence and imbecility —had now it seems made up their mind, though without a particle of evidence, that young Edalji, then at school, not at Walsall as they apparently supposed, but at Rugeley, was the culprit. Accordingly, the Chief Constable of Staffordshire wrote on January 23, 1893, to the Rev. Mr. Edalji:
Will you please ask your son George from whom the key was obtained which was found on your doorstep. . . . I may at once say that I shall not pretend to believe any protestations of innocence which your son may make about the key. My information on the subject does not come from the police.
We may ask in passing from what source it did come, and we may perhaps be forgiven for surmising that it came from an anonymous letter written by the real culprit, or by some hoaxer. And now occurred an incident which deserves particular notice. A few days after the key was found Mr, and Mrs, Edalji were sitting at supper, George and his brother and sister being upstairs in bed. They were roused by a loud knocking at “the side door.” On opening it they were confronted by a sergeant and a constable. The sergeant asserted that while watching at the front door he heard somebody come down the carpeted staircase in ‘‘stockinged feet,” adding also that he heard “ breathing,” and he requested Mr. Edalji to come with him “and see if they could find anything.” On the front hall-floor they discovered a leaflet in an envelope. Mr. Edalji pointed out that the missive could not have been placed there by anyone in the house, as he and Mrs, Edalji were sitting with the dining-room door open, looking on the hall; adding that it was physically impossible for anyone to hear “stockinged feet,” and still less “breathing” through a thick outer door a dozen feet from the foot of the bottom of the stairs, and a second inner door between the outer door and the stairs which was shut. As the constables insisted that the missive could not have been pushed under the outer hall door Mr. Edalji himself put the paper under the door and flipped it easily into the place where it had been found. To his inquiry how it was that they had come round to the side door when they would have had a better chance of detecting the offender had they raised the alarm at the front door, they gave no reply. But the next day it was reported in the village that George Edalji had been detected putting letters under the vicarage door! Mr. Edalji communicated all this to the Chief Constable, Captain Anson. On December 20 the Chief Constable replied—for the inference had been obvious: “I do not think we need seriously discuss the possibility of Sergeant having himself placed anything under your door with a view to fixing blame on some other person,” Mr. Edalji then asked Captain Anson to grant him an interview and to come over to the vicarage that he might see for himself the physical impossibility of what the sergeant had asserted about “stockinged feet” and “breathing.” With neither of these requests did the Chief Constable comply.
Meanwhile these intolerable persecutions—anonymous letters and hoaxes—continued, and on July 25, 1895, the Chief Constable wrote again to Mr. Edalji, George being now in his twenty-first year and a law student. The letter, most of which is printed by Sir Conan Doyle, certainly seems to imply that the Chief Constable not only suspected George Edalji of being the author of the letters and the hoaxes, but—to quote his own words—“trusted to be able to obtain a dose of penal servitude for the offender,” adding, “I have no doubt the offender will be detected.” If this letter indeed be placed side by side with a letter afterwards written by him to Mr. Yelverton, dated November 8, 1903, it will not be difficult to show how strongly the mind of the Chief Constable had been prejudiced against the young man.
It is right to tell you that you will find it a simple waste of time to attempt to prove that George Edalji could not, owing to his position and alleged good character, have been guilty of writing offensive and abominable letters. His father is as well aware as I am of his proclivities in the direction of anonymous writing, and several other people have personal knowledge on the same subject.
It may be observed in passing that as both Edalji and his father declare on oath that George never wrote an anonymous letter in his life, and that as the Chief Constable, when asked for the names of the “several other people,” returned no answer, the Commission should, at least, give so important and responsible a functionary an opportunity of explanation. No one can blame the Chief Constable for entertaining suspicions. But that he should have made no reply either to a letter from Mr. Edalji craving again for an interview with him, or to two letters, copies of which are now lying before me, from Mrs, Edalji, dated respectively September 4 and September 7, 1895, asking the same favour, is surely to be regretted.
I always felt [she writes] that if you had come over to see us yourself I would have been better and you would have seen how utterly impossible it was for Sergeant ——’s statement about the paper under our hall door to have been correct.
Such was the state of affairs at the end of 1895. Can anyone doubt that the strongest prejudice against George Edalji existed both on the part of the police and on the part of their Chief?
THE EDALJI CASE — At the end of 1895 the persecutions suddenly ceased— hoaxes and anonymous letters alike—and for seven years all was peace. Young Edalji having passed most creditably, and with an excellent character, through the Mason College (now the University) at Birmingham, had been articled to a solicitor in that city. After gaining a number of prizes from the Birmingham Law Society, he passed his final examination with honours, gained the Law Society’s bronze medal for 1898, had started in practice for himself, and was the author of a well-known popular handbook on railway law. His life, as might be supposed, was regular and studious, and might, indeed, be described as ascetic, for he was a total abstainer, and did not even smoke, Innumerable testimonies exist to his excellent character and industrious habits. He lived with his parents at the vicarage of Great Wyrley, as he had always done, returning each evening from school and college when a student, and from his office when a professional man, On February 2, 1903, occurred the first serious mutilation outrage at Great Wyrley. Between that date and August 17 were perpetrated at intervals seven others. But it was not till July 1, when seven of them had been committed, that the letter initiating the third epidemic of these missives was received. They were addressed principally to the police, and were evidently written for the purpose of connecting Edalji with the crimes. Whether there was any connection between the writer or writers of these letters and the mutilation atrocities, or whether these atrocities were merely mischievously utilised, is still a mystery. The chief purport of them was to represent him as one of a gang engaged in the horrible business, but it is quite plain that they were designed also to befool and mystify the police, as constables and detectives had been poured into the district only to make themselves laughing-stocks everywhere, the outrages being not only continued, but committed under their very noses, It is significant that a watch was placed on Edalji before the first anonymous letter connecting him with the crimes had been received, and it would be interesting to know what led to his being suspected. The writer or writers of the letters, whether themselves engaged in the outrages or not, must have exulted—as, indeed, the letters show they did— in their ghastly pleasantry. At last the baffled and half-distracted police appear to have made up their minds that some arrest must be made. They already, as we have seen, had their eye on George Edalji, and the outbreak of anonymous letters connecting him with what was being done confirmed them in their suspicion.
And now begins the incredible, but perfectly explicable, part of this story. Among the many missives received by Mr. Edalji at his office in Birmingham was an open post card, accusing him in terms so gross that they cannot be reproduced, of infamous immorality, and advising him to “get back to your old game of writing offensive letters, killing cows and writing on walls.” Of this, as we shall see, the police possessed themselves, and backed by the opinion of Mr. Thomas Gurrin, whose fiasco in the Beck case is still fresh in memory, pronounced it to be in the disguised handwriting of Edalji himself. Why a young solicitor beginning his career and naturally dependent on a clean reputation, should by accusing himself on open post-cards of shocking immorality, have courted professional and social ruin, they apparently did not stop to consider. But this precious piece of evidence— this their trump card—was not as yet in their hands. We come now to the crime for which Mr. Edalji was arrested, and of which he was convicted. At 5.40 on the morning of August 18, a lad named Henry Garrett found a pony terribly mutilated in a field near Great Wyrley Colliery ‘‘with a wound fourteen or fifteen inches long across its belly,” and hard upon death. At 8.30 on the same morning it was examined by Mr. R. N. Lewis, a veterinary surgeon, who deposed that “the wound was quite fresh, and must have been inflicted within six hours of the time I saw it,” as the drain of blood, which was then, according to Garrett, “ dropping pretty quickly,” must have otherwise been fatal. This, be it noted, would fix the time of the mutilation not earlier than 2.30 AM. That such a wound could not possibly have been inflicted without leaving considerable stains on the clothes—on the cuffs and trousers of the perpetrator particularly—was declared on oath by the eminent veterinary surgeon, Mr. Edward Sewell.
About eight o’clock on the morning of the discovery of the outrage a police-inspector called at the vicarage, requesting that George Edalji’s clothes should be shown to him and any instrument which might have enabled him to effect the mutilation. There was nothing to represent such an instrument but a set of razors belonging to the Vicar; there were dark spots on one of them, but the spots proved on examination to be rust stains. So the razors broke down, and with them all hope of finding the required instrument. Next came the clothes; boots were produced, and they were wet; then trousers, and they were damp and rather muddy, both of which facts were, as we shall presently see, quite satisfactorily accounted for. Last came an old house coat. Chemical analysis and expert inspection afterwards reduced apparently damning evidence—so ran the exulting sergeant’s testimony—- Numerous stains of a whitish colour, which had the appearance of saliva, reddish stains, one four inches long, on both cuffs ”——to starch, probably the relic of spilt bread and milk, and “two stains on the centre of the right cuff, each about the size of a three-penny piece,” due probably to a splash from the gravy of underdone meat or some such cause. So vanished more than half of the damning evidence. Let us see how the other half fares, The inspector asserted that there were some horse-hairs on the coat, whereupon Mr. Edalji, holding the coat close to the light, denied that there was any horse-hair on it, and challenged the officer to produce any. The Vicar’s testimony was confirmed both by Mrs. and Miss Edalji, who said that what had been taken for horse-hair “looked like a roving.” It was quite easy for the inspector to secure a specimen or specimens of what he asserted he saw, place what he picked off in an envelope and in the presence of his subordinate, seal it up. He did nothing of the kind, and this most important point was left undecided.
The clothes were then removed to the police-station. There they remained for twelve hours, till nine in the evening, when they were examined, not by an independent witness who could not, so it was alleged, be found, but by the police-surgeon, Dr. Butter. He undoubtedly discovered, to the great satisfaction of the police, twenty-nine horse-hairs on the coat, and five on the waistcoat. How did the hairs get there?—for according to the sworn testimony of the Edalji family there were no hairs on the coat when it left the vicarage. It is not difficult to conjecture. The pony having been killed, a strip of its hide—sent for and at the police office, be it observed long before Dr. Butter saw the coat— had been cut off and packed in a parcel placed in the same bundle as Mr. Edalji’s clothes. The hairs on the coat— according to the evidence of Dr. Butter—exactly corresponded with the hairs of the strip, and the presumption, therefore, is that the coat had in some way come or been brought into contact with the strip of hide. On the whole of this incident the neglect of the inspector to secure incontestable evidence of the truth of his assertion and on the shameful carelessness, to call it by no worse name, of packing the coat in the same bundle with the strip of hide there is no need to comment.
This is bad enough, but what it’s to be thought of the following? It was not till 9.30 A.M., nearly four hours after the discovery of the wounded pony, that a constable bethought him of taking one of ‘Mr. Edalji’s boots, and comparing it with the footprints in the field where the animal lay dying. By that time the ground, saturated with the rain of the preceding night, had been trampled by crowds of miners and others on their way to Wyrley Colliery, which is close to the scene of the outrage. He put the boot—one of a pair which had been purchased at a ready-made store in Walsall, where there were, of course, scores of the same size and pattern—by the side of a footprint “flat upon the ground and pressed it down with both his hands,” thus obtaining an impression, and thus it may be noted getting the mud of the place on to the boot which furnished the prosecution with one of the most damning pieces of evidence at the trial. These footprints, of which no cast was secured and no photograph taken, he professed to trace over the whole route supposed to be traversed by Edalji after the outrage had been done. Asked why he had not dug up a clod and so secured a perfect impression, he replied that ‘‘the ground was too soft in one place and too hard in another.” Asked how he had measured the footprints, he replied: “By bits of stick and a straw”! So much for the footprints.
Meanwhile Mr. Edalji had been arrested. And now absurdities thicken. The mutilation must have taken place sometime between 9 P.M., when the pony was seen well and intact by the man who fed it, and 9.25, when Mr. Edalji was seen entering the Vicarage gate, or it must have taken place between that time and about 2.30 A.M. Now, Mr. Edalji’s movements on that night have been perfectly accounted for. He returned from his office at Birmingham about 6.30. He then went out into the village, the road being dirty, wet and muddy from the rain which had fallen during the day, which accounted for his wet boots and the mud on the trousers next morning, the mud being, observe, that of the road on which he had walked, not the yellow-red mud of the field in which the crime was committed. At 8.55 he was at Hand’s shop at Bridgtown. About 9 o’clock he was spoken to by the witnesses Harry Leach and Fred Cope by the canal bridge, a mile and a half from the scene of the outrage. Between 9 and 9.20 he was seen by other witnesses in Station Street, and at 9.25 he was seen by Walter Whitehouse entering the Vicarage grounds. The theory consequently that he committed the crime between 9.5 and 9.40, which was the first theory of the prosecution, was at the last moment abandoned. And now, how does the other theory fare? By the sworn testimony of the Rev. Mr. Edalji and of every member of the household, he had his supper about 9.30, and, without leaving the house, went to bed at 10.45, occupying as he had done for seventeen years the same bedroom as his father. It was the custom of the Vicar to lock the bedroom door. He was a light sleeper, and lighter than usual that night, for he was restless and wakeful owing to an attack of lumbago. He solemnly swore that his son never left the room till he dressed for breakfast about 6.30 next morning.
But putting aside Mr. Edalji’s evidence, what are the facts that confront us? George Edalji then and now was afflicted with myopia of six dioptres, his exact case, as described by Mr. Kenneth Scott, being,
The night of August 17 was pitch dark, the darkness being described by one of the police as “ phenomenal, ” wild and windy, the rain coming in squalls, and at times very heavy. We are to assume that Mr. Edalji—this myope of eight dioptres—found his way along a colliery tramway littered with obstacles at every step ; crossed the main line of the L. & N.W. Railway with its signal wires and fencings, over low rows of metals and sidings, points and sleepers; descended a steep flight of steps under an archway, made his way into the field, groping about till he found the pony; that he then—for this is what the police alleged—returned by another and equally difficult route over open country, where there were no paths of any kind and where he would have to cross three or four ditches and find his way through several gaps in hedges. Such, according to the police, was the exploit of a myope of eight dioptres who moreover, as was proved, did not wear glasses! Now, let us picture to ourselves what must have been the state of his clothes on his arrival home after such an expedition, on such a night, and compare the condition they must necessarily have been in with the actual condition of the clothes examined by the police about 8 o’clock on the same morning. Again, is it likely that he could either have left the vicarage or have entered that field undetected? In the immediate neighbourhood we know from the police that there were no fewer than twenty men on the watch. On the night before the outrage Sergeant Robinson saw four men observing the front door and side door, is it likely that no one was on the watch there on the following night? Why were none of these men called at the trial? It is certain that at least three policemen, one of whom was stationed in the archway, were watching the field that night and did not leave it till 5 A.M.
On August 18 Mr. Edalji was taken into custody, and in custody he remained till his trial. But the outrages continued. On September 21 a horse was discovered horribly mutilated— to this I return presently. On November 3 the most devilish of all these horrors was perpetrated; three months later there was a third, and finally, on March 24, a fourth, which last was followed by the conviction on circumstantial evidence, anything but satisfactory, of a miner named Farrington.
In all this extraordinary case there is perhaps nothing so extraordinary as the conduct of the police with reference to the first of this second series of outrages. The facts are these. A horse was discovered disembowelled, the stomach, liver and internal organs scattered in all directions, one of the very worst illustrations, in fact, of these horrors. The horse belonged to one Harry Green, a young fellow who lived near the vicarage and who was a Yeomanry trooper, On the police asking him if it was his work he denied it, but after some hours of questioning at the police court, signed a confession that he had done it. This confession not being in order was suppressed, and on October 6 he signed a second confession with due formality. A week after he wholly repudiated both confessions on the plea that he had been bullied into signing them by the police, and had meanwhile obtained a ticket to go out to South Africa. Now mark the action of the police. They had in their hands two confessions signed by Green, the informal confession and the formal confession. At the trial Inspector Campbell was asked with reference to Green’s horse: “Have you discovered who did that?” “No, Sir. O! I beg your pardon, we have an idea.’ “Have you made an arrest?” ‘“No, Sir.” At last it was elicited that Green had done it, and that, subpoenaed by the police, he was in Court. But the prosecution did not call him, and the fact that he had been subpoenaed by the police accounts, no doubt, for the fact that the defence did not call him. A week after the trial Green went off to South Africa and his second confession was published, in which he said that he had mutilated his horse “to keep the game rolling.” Mark that! And this man was allowed without further inquiry to leave the country. Why, it may be demanded, did the Crown not call Green, and why did the police not prosecute him? This is certain, that by not calling him, the prosecution with the connivance of the police cleared the way for the conviction of Edalji, and what is worse made capital out of the assumption or insinuation that Green, being one of the gang in league with Edalji, had mutilated the horse to create evidence for the defence. The Counsel for the Crown cannot be blamed for acting on his instructions, but if the police were aware that there was no intimacy between Green and Edalji, and if, as Sir Conan Doyle positively asserts, they are in possession of an assurance from Green that he was not in league with Edalji and had not mutilated his horse for the purpose of shielding him, what is to be thought of them? One thing it is to be hoped that the forthcoming commission will insist on, and that is the production of Green’s first confession, the publication of which, in spite of an urgent appeal from the great Wyrley Parish Council, the Chief Constable has up till now refused.
Of the conduct of the trial it is difficult to speak in measured terms. To call it a travesty of justice would be very imperfectly to describe its true character. Here, in the first place, was a crime of the most serious kind, one of a series which for months had been the theme of inflamed indignation, the accused notoriously the subject of the strongest local prejudice ; everything, indeed, calling aloud for regular impartial trial at Assizes. It is tried instead at a second Court of Quarter Sessions, in the immediate neighbourhood of the crime, by a county justice whose legal qualifications were so deficient that a fee was paid to a barrister to be present to advise him, this same barrister afterwards admitting—l will quote his own words —that he had to leave the Court two or three times, so that parts of the case, when I was not wanted, I did not hear.
Could anything be more monstrous than the submission of letters to the jury admittedly not in the handwriting of the accused, or even ascribed to him, but merely anonymous tirades of abuse designed simply to prejudice their minds? or than allowing a police inspector not only to hand to the jury an anonymous post-card not ascribed to the prisoner, but to repeat an alleged conversation based on it for the purpose of implying that the accused was implicated in crimes with which he was not charged ?—proceedings recalling the worst features of the Dreyfus case. It is to be presumed that it was during one of the absences of the “ advising ” barrister that the Chairman, on a juryman putting a very proper question— namely, how the impression of the boot was compared with the foot-prints in the field—naively observed, “ You had better not make any remarks like this ; you must not criticise.”
One other point—and it is, perhaps, the worst feature of this truly deplorable case—demands a word. What was the source, or sources, of the abominable calumnies circulated against the young man’s morals at the time of the trial, and just afterwards when Mr. Edalji’s advocates were endeavouring to get the case re-opened? That there was no ground for them is incontestably established; that they scared off many from assisting him is certain. Did they emanate from the police?
Such are the facts of this extraordinary case, lamentable alike both in what they involve and in what they indicate—suffering and shame unspeakable inflicted on a respectable and innocent man, and on an honourable and blameless family; the constabulary of a leading English county without discipline or intelligence, wholly ignorant of the very rudiments of their duties, and laying themselves open to the suspicion of a most infamous conspiracy; the most responsible police official in the county singularly deficient, to put it very mildly, in judgment, tact, and common courtesy; a Court of Quarter Sessions capable of such proceedings as have been described; and, in addition to all this, the possibility of serious negligence and miscarriages even in the highest quarters,
The promised Commission may do much or do little; all will depend on its constitution and on the publicity of its proceedings. What is certain is that it must necessarily be in the interests of some at least in authority to limit its functions and place close restrictions on the area of its inquiries. But the public will not be satisfied with the official declaration of Mr. Edalji’s innocence and his reinstatement in his profession, with adequate pecuniary compensation, for such considerations, important though they be, are of comparatively small importance when weighed with what this case at once involves and illustrates—the credit and honour of some of the most responsible departments of the public service, the grave defects inherent in our provincial administration of justice, the possibility of all that should secure the safety, liberty, and dearest interests of our citizens being perverted into the means for attaining the exactly opposite ends.
J. CHURTON COLLINS.
The Legacy of the Edalji Affair: The 1913 Episode
The first question I wanted to examine is why was the Wyrley area was haunted by the affair as contrary to what seems to be the generally held opinion, that animal maiming was somehow a rare event, such attacks (or threats of within anonymous letters) in rural and semi-rural areas, while not the norm, were far from unheard of; indeed, the semi-frequency of such attacks is easy to prove: I simply typed the phrase cattle mutilations into the British Newspaper Archive site and thousands of ‘hits’ came up (this search would exclude other, similar phrases such as horse attack, for example). Just in the Great Wyrley area – and this is mentioned by Collins – Henry Badger, farmer and keeper of the Star Inn in Wyrley, lost two sheep and a lamb the year after the Edalji conviction (for which a local man, Thomas Farrington, was imprisoned on the evidence of a button being found at the site) and a horse belonging to John Cartwright of Hobble End farm was gashed in 1907 – although a cow was one suspect!
It is impossible to say why each attack was committed but it must be remembered that such animals were a soft target for those with sadist dispositions, or from those with a grievance towards a company or individual. While the reports of such attacks may be restricted to local newspapers in random cases, what initially thrust Great Wyrley into the spotlight and the national media was, it seems to me, the number of attacks over a short period of time coupled with the anonymous correspondence – Jack the Ripper style – that accompanied it (especially as Great Wyrley had past form on such missives – the Elizabeth Foster incident also being cited by Collins). Added to this – and also in Jack style – was the fact that the police seemed baffled and unable to prevent such attacks, which is not surprising given that anonymous letters were employed for the very reason that they were hard to trace and the near impossibility in protecting animals in open fields on a 24/7 basis other than by having a minder permanently with them.
This bout of attacks was followed by the arrest and subsequent imprisoning of George Edalji, a vicar’s son, technically for committing just one of those acts; the problem was, however, that irrespective of whatever involvement he may or may not have had in the events, Edalji was clearly convicted in what was, at best, a flawed trial. It was this, in my opinion, that moved Great Wyrley from being a simple location, a victim itself, into one that was tarnished with a miscarriage of justice.
Edalji in the dock, 1903. Staffordshire Past Track (Staffordshire County Council)
While this should have been evident at the time, the coup de grace for Great Wyrley’s reputation would come with the later involvement of Conan Doyle – and the national audience he could reach through his Sherlock Holmes fame – in seeking to exonerate Edalji. While Doyle was not warring with the people of Great Wyrley themselves, the damage to the name of the township had been done and afterwards Great Wyrley would intermittently be dragged before, and humiliated by, the nation over the affair.
Staffordshire Police at the 1903 trial. Staffordshire Past Track (Staffordshire County Council)
A good example, and by no means a unique one, comes from the 16 September 1907 edition of the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, which featured an article under the banner of ‘Cattle Mutilation at Wyrley… Threats for Cornwall.’ This article went on to detail a letter, signed D. Success, that was received at the Newquay police station and referred to the Great Wyrley outrages: ‘We are five of us. Two are here, and three more are to come. We have interviewed Detective Collins (engaged on the Great Wyrley case) and know all about his methods. He will never catch us. They can have all the horses locked up and guarded if they like. It will be of no use for they are doomed.’ The letter, ‘which concluded that they will commence cattle maiming at the end of the week, has been transmitted to every police station in Cornwall, and the police are acquainting farmers with its contents.’
So, moving forward, as 1913 trickled away, and when according to the Cannock Courier you could get a nine-gallon cask of Highgate stout for 12 shillings, it seems that Great Wyrley Parish Council was more pre-occupied with the reputation of the township as a whole than any remote concern over Germanic sabre rattling as tensions mounted internationally in the run-up to the Great War. The reason for the Parish Council’s concern was inevitably the name of the village was once again in the unwelcome spotlight due to a new series of animal attacks that had started in the September of that year, although not in the Wyrley area itself but around Pleck, Darlaston and Wednesbury. Reports of the attacks, and the familiar accompanying anonymous letters and postcards signed ‘the Wyrley gang’ or ‘the Darby gang’ (G. H. Darby claiming to be the leader), began to appear in newspapers up and down the country.
Again, an example of this can be taken from The Mid Sussex Times, when it carried a paragraph in its 16 September edition: ‘A postcard bearing the Walsall postmark, received in Wolverhampton from the “Headquarters, Market Place, Wyrley,” stated: “If the bluebottles and bluedevils [meaning individual constables and other policemen] in Staffordshire don’t leave the force in a week from now the Wyrley gang will maim one hundred horses in Staffordshire after next week. It will take some time to do the outrages, and our gang will start it in a very short time from now if the police don’t leave the force next week.” It was signed ‘G.H. Derby, Captain of the Wyrley gang.’ The continued reporting finally drew a response from the Parish Council on 8 November 1913, when councillor Mr A. Sambrook appealed to the press to stop printing references to the Darby letters, or at least stop linking Great Wyrley with them. His plea failed.
The township’s reputation was very important as Great Wyrley and Landywood were not only growing themselves, but in doing so these dispersed regions were growing closer together. One place where the rapid growth of the Great Wyrley area could be seen is with the need to provide local education: the Victoria County History states that the Great Wyrley Board School, on the Walsall Road, had been opened in 1882 but had to be enlarged in 1906 and, even then, numbers of those attending from outside the parish had to be restricted in 1910. The Landywood Council School was opened in 1908 and a glance at its first admission and discharge registers shows that the school’s catchment area included Newtown, parts of Essington, as well as Upper and Lower Landywood – thus easing Great Wyrley’s problems.
Perhaps the most visual indication of growth to those at the time was the provision of new housing, as even a casual glance at the Ordnance Survey maps of 1903 and 1921 (surveyed before these dates) will show the clear development locally. In Great Wyrley town a number of houses were built between the Swan Inn and the Star Inn, on the opposite side of the Walsall Road, with many carrying a date stone such as Thornleigh, 1910; Leafield, 1911 and Lauriston Villas, 1912. It was, perhaps, Landywood that saw greatest change – surely driven by the arrival of Harrison’s mine: Landywood saw a set of 24 houses, called Wootton’s Buildings, erected on the Walsall Road in 1913 that went from Wharwell Lane towards Newtown; a range of houses that went from Jones Lane toward the Wheatsheaf Inn (the house named Croxdene is dated to 1911); and some houses built on the corners of Shaws Lane and Walsall Road and Bentons Lane and Walsall Road. The census shows that Lower Landywood saw the carving out of New Street, then New Villa Street, by 1911 (some houses having been standing for several years prior), although it was, according to the Walsall Observer, formally adopted by Cannock Rural District Council in July 1913.
With all of the huge importing of labour into the Great Wyrley and Landywood areas it is not surprising that more people sought to settle in these townships; there was, however, a major problem: the infrastructure, both utility and service, failed to cope. In a Parish Council meeting that was reported in the Cannock Courier on 9 May 1914, the plain-speaking colliery overman and parish councillor George Henry Goodwin made a comment referring to the parish gas supply that, however, was a truism in general: ‘they were twenty years behind the times at Great Wyrley in all but hard work.’ His comment was met with merriment.
We must put this development into context to some degree: as far as Great Wyrley and Landywood were concerned the development was significant compared to what these communities already consisted of, however, if you moved off the Walsall Road you were still effectively walking through fields and so if you strolled down Shaws Lane from the Walsall Road, in the direction of Lower Landywood, you would not only see the right side of the road devoid of housing, but most of the left as well.
So, to finish, the reason why the Parish Council was precious about the reputation of the township, I would argue, was that they were simply looking to the future – with building and infrastructural development, coupled with the growth of the population – and they were just sick of being tied to the past. While George had left Great Wyrley, it is important to stress that the Edalji’s were still incumbent at the vicarage in 1913 and were until Shapurji’s death in May 1918 a focal point of both the religious community and the local war effort in Great Wyrley and Cheslyn Hay; with this in mind, I would suggest that the want to not look back at the events of 10 years previous was pretty universal in Great Wyrley.
My thanks to:
Tony Kulik: Staffordshire Past Track (Staffordshire County Council): https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/: Project Gutenberg of Australia http://gutenberg.net.au.
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