THE STABBING OF GEORGE HARRY STORRS JONATHAN GOODMAN $15.00 THE STABBING OF GEORGE HARRY STORRS BY JONATHAN GOODMAN OCTOBER OF 1910 WAS A VINTAGE MONTH FOR murder trials in England. On Saturday, the twenty-second, after a five-day trial at the Old Bailey in London, the expatriate American doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen was found guilty of poi­ soning his wife Cora, who was best known by her stage name of Belle Elmore. And on the following Monday, Mark Wilde entered the dock in Court Number One at Chester Castle to stand trial for the stabbing of George Harry Storrs. He was the second person to be tried for the murder—the first, Cornelius Howard, a cousin of the victim, having earlier been found not guilty. The "Gorse Hall mystery," as it became known from its mise-en-scene, the stately residence of the murdered man near the town of Stalybridge in Cheshire, was at that time almost twelve months old; and it had captured the imagination of the British public since the morning of November 2, 1909, when, according to one reporter, "the whole country was thrilled with the news of the outrage." Though Storrs, a wealthy mill-owner, had only a few weeks before erected a massive alarm bell on the roof of Gorse Hall after telling the police of an attempt on his life, it did not save him from being stabbed to death by a mysterious intruder. Storrs died of multiple wounds with­ out revealing anything about his attacker, though it was the impression of [Continued on back flap] THE STABBING OF GEORGE HARRY STORRS THE STABBING OF JONATHAN GOODMAN OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS Copyright © 1983 by the Ohio State University Press All rights reserved. Preface copyright © 1983 by Jacques Barzun Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Goodman, Jonathan. The stabbing of George Harry Storrs. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Murder—England—Stalybridge (Greater Manchester). 2. Storrs, George Harry. I. Title. HV6535.G6S724 1983 364.1'523'0942735 83-8267 ISBN 0-8142-0349-3 ForK (Mrs. Robert R Hussey) with love CONTENTS Preface by Jacques Barzun xi Acknowledgments xv CHAPTER ONE. The Scene of the Crime 3 CHAPTER TWO. The Bell 21 CHAPTER THREE. The Artilleryman Reservist 65 CHAPTER FOUR. A Trial 97 CHAPTER FIVE. The Convict in Knutsford Gaol 125 CHAPTER SIX. Another Trial 152 CHAPTER SEVEN. An Assortment of Verdicts 192 CHAPTER EIGHT. After the Fact 213 Selective Bibliography 227 Index 229 ILLUSTRATIONS 1. View of Stalybridge from below Gorse Hall 6 2. Gorse Hall 9 3. Old Gorse Hall 10 4. George Harry Storrs 15 5. Rough plan of crime scene drawn by Henry Heald 27 6. Dr. Williams's drawings of the size and position of the wounds 45 7. The "American Bullock" revolver 54 8. The police "Wanted" notice 70 9. Cornelius Howard, alias William Harrison 76 10. Photograph of Cornelius Howard sold as postcard 81 11. Police notice seeking whereabouts of witnesses 92 12. William Leah's telegram to Colonel Hamersley after Howard's committal for trial 95 13. Mr. Justice Pickford 98 14. The scene during Howard's trial 102 15. Early Bank Road 127 16. Robinson Street 132 17. Gorse Hall and environs 137 18. Plan of Knutsford Gaol 140 19. Knutsford Gaol 141 20. Mr. Justice Channell 142 21. Mr. Justice Horridge 153 22. A newspaper artist's impression of principals in Mark Wilde's trial 158 THE STABBING OF GEORGE HARRY STORRS 23. A newspaper artist's impressions of Cornelius Howard and Mark Wilde during the latter's trial 170 PREFACE JACQUES BARZUN Readers who refuse to turn to crime, whether in its fictional or historical form, generally give a strong reason for their aversion, and it is a reason not about themselves but about the fallen creatures who do enjoy those literary genres. The partakers are supposed to be athirst for crude sensations; they resemble the ugly mobs that storm the doors of the court at murder trials and secretly regret that capital executions are no longer public. To dissociate oneself from such as these seems natural enough. But like most moral imputations, this one is arbitrary and ill-founded. The connoisseurs of crime are for the most part people of sensibilities as delicate as the abstainers', and per­ haps they have stronger minds. They relish the varieties of human behavior, which is why they go to literature in addi­ tion to observing life. And in literature they find, among other types, tragedy, crime fiction, and what has come to be called "true crime." The appeal of this last-named species of composition is manifold. It presents ordinary human beings under stress: not just the principals, but a hitherto unconnected score of persons suddenly caught in the searchlight of a police investi­ gation. They are buffeted and bruised by newspaper reports and repeated grilling in and out of court; their earlier doings, their secrets, their abilities and pretensions, are made into a public show. It is a grim novel in action, a novel in the mode of Dickens and Dostoevsky, who in fact drew upon just such live materials for their most renowned effects. The art needed to make a famous murder case intelligible and true is not the common property of all professional xii THE STABBING OF GEORGE HARRY STORRS writers. Some excellent hands at crime fiction have fumbled when they attempted actual history. Indeed, one may dis­ tinguish three forms of the "true" genre, each of which draws on special abilities. The first is the long essay, fifty to seventy- five pages long, which recounts in the manner of a story­ teller—summarizing, commenting, judging in a kind of monologue. William Roughead showed his mastery of this form in the dozen or so volumes he published between 1913 and 1941. Henry James was one of his early and avid readers. At the opposite extreme—and here again Roughead dis­ played his craft—is the full-blown report of a trial, as in the well-known Notable British Trials and similar series. In such works, large portions of the courtroom testimony are re­ produced verbatim, with commentary and explanations of character and event as needed. The skill here is editorial and aimed at fashioning as complete a record of the case as can be given in portable form. It is the next thing to the combined police files, court transcripts, and newspaper reports weigh­ ing half a ton. The great English historian Maitland declared that to compare successive ages he would choose to witness (or study) famous murder trials. In between the essay and the trial stands the kind of work Mr. Goodman furnishes in the present book. It offers an account of a crime that he himself has investigated retro­ spectively, almost three-quarters of a century after the event. His narrative is much richer in detail than an essay could be, but it does not include the day-by-day progress of the trial. In the instant case this would mean tedious repetition, since two men were tried, one after the other, for the murder of George Harry Storrs. But the presence of two suspects cer­ tainly adds to the suspense, the bewilderment, the social and psychological interest of the extraordinary sequence of events. The outline of the Gorse Hall case has long been known to criminologists and their lay counterparts. But not until Mr. Goodman showed us the fruits of his amazingly pertinacious and minute inquiries could we see with any sharpness of vision the dramatis personae, their habits and foibles, the places they frequented, and their dubious or likely relation to PREFACE xiii the still incomprehensible menace which ended the life of the Stalybridge tycoon on 1 November 1909. The first surprise one receives from the author's vividly written and beautifully composed narrative is how much is known about the souls and deeds of unimportant people and how much survives in the memory of their contemporaries. But it takes a kind of genius to recover all this lore; compared with the feat, the boasted retrieval that a computer performs is dull routine, for in fact it has no memory and knows nothing. Next, the view of human life that one is left with after the recital of such a complex crime is that irrationality prevails— not in the sense of the passions unrestrained, but in the sense that silly, stupid, mad, inexplicable words and acts form the web of ordinary experience. That is why in any mystery like the one here related the loose ends are many and remain forever untied. But those features do not mean that reason cannot satisfy itself about the main facts and motives. Human behavior is simultaneously mysterious and comprehensible, and it is the great virtue of such writers as Mr. Goodman to extend the scope of our understanding, thanks to their own curiosity and love of the rational. In two previous works, The Killing of Julia Wallace and The Burning of Evelyn Foster, our author was able to discover, in the one, the identity of the murderer, in the other, the exact concatenation of events, while also remov­ ing from both cases that accretion of falsehoods, big and small, which tradition and lesser writers perpetuate. Whether one agrees or not with Mr. Goodman's specula­ tion about the cause of the Storrs murder and the culprit, every reader must acknowledge that all the evidence about each of the three candidates for that office has been mar­ shalled with superlative skill and absolute fairness. It is this triple power of search, analysis, and reconstruction that makes Jonathan Goodman the direct heir of Roughead as the greatest living master of the true-crime literature.