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Lethal Witness Lethal Witness Andrew Rose Barrister and Author A meeting of the Society was held at the Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London W1, on Thursday, 2 April 2009. The President, Dr Robin Moffat, was in the Chair. The President: Hello members and guests. Thank you very much for coming out on Obama day. You haven’t been seduced to the East End of London you have stuck with us here in the West. We are very pleased to welcome tonight a distinguished barrister and a retired Immigration Judge, Andrew Rose, who is an author and he has written a number of books, one of which was nominated for a prize. Most of the matters he has written about have been forensic, have they not? Murder on a Common; is that right? One or two things like that. So we are very pleased to have him here and his address, of course, is entitled Lethal Witness, and the lethal witness is not here tonight, he departed many years ago, and his name was Bernard Spilsbury, a household name in the last century, particularly in the twenties and thirties. Bernard Spilsbury was very well known to everybody who practised or who were students in the twenties and thirties and I always compare him to Hamilton Bailey. These two names: they were very similar men. Hamilton Bailey was a surgeon who smoked three packs a day; I think Spilsbury used to smoke about three packs a day. They both lost their sons in tragic circumstances and they both had what amounted to nervous breakdowns. Hamilton Bailey was in Graylingwell Hospital for some three years and was one of the early patients who received lithium to good effect. So they were comparable medical figures. Probably Hamilton Bailey was not quite as well known in the public arena as Bernard Spilsbury. There have been a number of books about Spilsbury. Yours, I think, is the third. Browne and Tullett produced a very good book, which was more of a hymn of praise than anything else, and there has been another paperback which I think emanated from America and now we have got the official biography, and I think this is our third book-signing meeting. They are very successful and I hope the price has been reduced to £20. Mr Rose: £10 for cash. The President: £10 for cash. It sounds like a barrister talking. (Laughter.) Tonight you are faced by a former President of the Royal College of Surgeons and a Professor of Forensic Medicine from Dundee, who will be watching every word you have to say, and we look forward, Andrew, to your address: please come to the rostrum and start. Mr Rose: It is a great honour to be invited to address the Medico-Legal Society, not least because the subject of my talk, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, was your President in 1933 and from the early 1900s right through to his death in 1947 he was an active member. So it is with some trepidation that I address you about Spilsbury, because what I am going to say about him isn’t really terribly complimentary. My conclusions about his career are based largely on Home Office, Metropolitan Police, and other official files, many of which were originally closed for 75 to 100 years and which were opened on my application in a process akin to pulling out hen’s teeth. My view of Spilsbury, which somebody has described, perhaps correctly, as “unforgiving”, is entirely my responsibility. Although Spilsbury’s career encompassed many aspects of forensic medicine, some of which I am sure are above criticism, I have chosen to concentrate on Spilsbury’s appearances in murder trials for this critical assessment, not least because my own experience as a barrister in criminal practice impels me to the view that several defendants were wrongly convicted of murder, and indeed executed, on what was essentially flawed evidence, and flawed by the standards of his own time, not applying, of course, the wisdom of hindsight, which would not be fair. Who Was Bernard Spilsbury? He was the founder of the modern cult of forensic pathology. He was effectively the first dedicated forensic pathologist in England and, by an outstandingly skilful presentation in court, he brought forensic pathology out of its Victorian shadows and into the public arena. He did not take refuge in medical jargon. He did not use twelve words where one would do and he explained complex pathological and toxicological problems in words that lay people could understand, without sacrificing the accuracy of his meaning. He gave minute attention to detail and, without doubt, showed dogged persistence in the face of the most daunting post-mortem conditions. By the 1920s his court appearances in a series of celebrated murder trials had made his name a household word, a media celebrity, whose A-List fame was reflected in the words Spilsbury Called In on newspaper hoardings, celebrating the discovery of some particularly gruesome crime. Standing “alone and unchallenged as our greatest medico-legal expert”, his became a worldwide reputation. In the 1920s detective stories were based on his character. By 1934 Time magazine in the USA was saluting Spilsbury as “the living successor to mythical Sherlock Holmes”, and on this side of the Atlantic Punch published a full-page cartoon and newspaper readers voted Spilsbury the “Best Read”, along with Greta Garbo, FD Roosevelt, Lloyd George, Mussolini and Gracie Fields. (Laughter.) Government ministers sought his advice on matters wildly beyond his expertise. No matter. At the height of his fame, whatever his view might be, his was always “the very best opinion that can be obtained”, in the opinion of one judge, the delight of trial judges, policemen and prosecutors. “Hero” Then – But Was He Also a “Villain”? One great advocate, whose father knew Spilsbury very well, described him as “a prima donna, increasingly thought of as a bit of a rogue”. Before revealing the shortcomings exhibited during Spilsbury’s 40 years as forensic pathologist, we must look briefly at his background, education, personal and professional life. He was born in Leamington Spa in May 1877, his father a wholesale and analytical chemist, who later became a successful manufacturer of synthetic rubber. This is not a “rags to riches” story because Spilsbury senior was very comfortably off. Spilsbury’s adolescent education (I have a photograph which shows him at about age 16 with his two younger sisters and brother) was badly fragmented between three different day schools, as his father moved around the country, and this dislocation seems to have been the prime cause of Spilsbury’s notoriously aloof, cold, even frigid personality. At the end of his life, even his two closest acquaintances could not truly be described as “friends” in the normal sense of the word. Maybe he felt more at home with corpses, “patients” as it were, who would never question his judgment or recover unexpectedly or answer him back. (Laughter.) In 1895 he went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, to study physiology. Although not a “public school man” in the clichéd sense, he exhibited an arrogance and idleness (at least in his first couple of years as undergraduate) that astounded his exasperated tutors. He was regarded as something of a “know- all” – “too confident of his powers”: the latter was a quote from one of his tutors – and exhibited failings which would emerge only too clearly during his professional career. He managed to achieve Second Class Honours, better than expected, but by no means the achievement of a high flyer. Significantly, Spilsbury in his lifetime gained no gold medals and won no major awards or scholarships. His choice of hospital, however, was truly first class (St Mary’s, Paddington) and it would be the making of him. In 1899 he enrolled there as a medical student. Underfunded, relatively understaffed and in dire need of new buildings, St Mary’s in the early 1900s was nonetheless the cutting edge of medicine in England, as many of you, I am sure, will know. It developed an outstanding team of surgeons, physicians, bacteriologists, toxicologists, and (although not always appreciated by the medical elite) pathologists. At the beginning of the twentieth century forensic pathology was still widely regarded as the “Beastly Science”, a hangover from scandals in the mid-Victorian era. Highflying consultants, with expensive private practices in Harley Street or Wimpole Street, regarded post- mortem examinations as infra dig, something for lab assistants, medical students and very junior doctors indeed. Spilsbury, always the loner, relished this unfashionable work and soon found his niche in the post-mortem room (uncomfortably near the Metropolitan and District Railway, whose trains shook the gloomy basement where he worked so painstakingly in those early years). He gradually assembled (if you will forgive me) a corpus of knowledge that, from 1905, began to fill the famous black notebooks and case cards that recorded over 20,000 post-mortems in a 40- year career, which also included him giving evidence for the prosecution (and I emphasise that) in over 200 English murder trials, in respect of which his early biographers, Browne and Tullett, stated that “only a handful of which ended in acquittal” – slightly chilling words in the context of what happened. Deeply conservative and youthfully religious – he was turned down for the Methodist Ministry – Spilsbury shared the prevailing reactionary outlook common among senior staff at St Mary’s. Although he was usually polite, reserved and never grand in manner (unlike many of his colleagues), Spilsbury abhorred the idea of women doctors and seems to have agreed with Sir Almroth Wright, the great bacteriologist, who notoriously declared that “Woman belongs to the logical underworld” (and thus did not deserve the vote).
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