The Anatomy of Murder, page 24
However, if it was the women of England who hanged Mrs. Thompson, against all reason and all justice, then it was equally due to the women of England that Mrs. Rattenbury was saved from the gallows; for if Mrs. Thompson had not been hanged, Mrs. Rattenbury surely would have been.
It is impossible to avoid comparing these two cases; for not only the cases themselves but the characters of the two women concerned had so many points in common. The factors that are common to both cases are obvious: the points of character scarcely less so. Both women possessed that strange force and power of impressing the other sex, which derives from an egocentric neuroticism in the female. (In the male it is interesting to note the reverse is usually the case: women are more difficult to bamboozle in this particular respect—though to make up for that they are a great deal easier in other and no less fatal respects.)
Both, again, were highly-strung, excitable, and at times hysterical; both were inevitably wrapped up in themselves and their own affairs. But whereas Mrs. Rattenbury’s vices were of the usual, ordinary kind which in a higher stratum of society are taken for granted, or even admired, Mrs. Thompson was Woman Herself: essential Woman, raised to a super-normal degree. (That if anything was what frightened the women of England about her. Every feminine attribute which they saw and admired in themselves, they had to recognize in Mrs. Thompson developed to a pitch far beyond their own; in every department of their sex they were outclassed. Perhaps it was not only the women of England who were frightened, after all.)
But if the characters of these two women are comparable in some degree, the two young men whom they officially ‘led astray’ were quite dissimilar.
Bywaters was, fundamentally, a decent lad; and it is an irony that it was his very decency which led him to murder. Dismissing the theory that his murder was committed on the spur of a momentary intolerable impulse (and anyone who has seen the knife which Bywaters carried with him that night will have difficulty in maintaining this theory: it was not the kind of knife which would sit comfortably in the pocket of even a ship’s steward), one may yet believe that he had had almost to drive himself to murder, as a point of honour. For a decent man, when he feels his passion for a woman waning, will go to much greater lengths on her behalf than when his love was at its height, with some obscure idea of proving to himself as well as to her that he would not be such a cad as to fall out of love with her. A man less punctilious will not feel this impulse.
So it may have been with Bywaters; but so it certainly was not with Stoner.
For Stoner there is not very much to be said, though there is a little. His motive was, in all probability, mainly a sordid one, though we shall see that to some extent it may have been mixed. As to his character, the evidence of a relative at his trial that Stoner was “a good, honest lad and the best boy he had ever seen in his life” may be excused as an exaggeration due to ex parte prejudice. Stoner may not have been the worst lad in the world, but he certainly possessed his share of unpleasing points.
The Rattenburys were both Canadian by birth. Francis Mawson Rattenbury, sixty-seven years old at the time of the crime, was a retired architect. By a previous marriage he had two sons, now adult. Mrs. Rattenbury was a good-looking woman of thirty-eight. She had been married twice before. Her first husband was killed in the war; from the second she was divorced. By the latter she had a son aged thirteen who was away at school in March 1935. Mr. and Mrs. Rattenbury had a joint son, John, six years old at that date. Since his birth Mrs. Rattenbury had, in the useful phrase, not ‘lived with’ her husband.
In 1935 the Rattenburys were living at the Villa Madeira, Manor Road, Bournemouth, a stuffy little house which was definitely below the standard of life to which their income entitled them. It is not possible to say exactly how much that income was; but Mrs. Rattenbury in her evidence accounted for at least £1,000 a year which passed through her own hands, so that it is not unreasonable to suppose that the total income must have been anything from £1,500 to £2,000 a year.
Mr. Rattenbury himself, though not an impossible person, seems not to have been a very lovable one. He was close with money, and his wife had to lie to him freely in order to obtain the sums she wanted; though it is quite possible that she wanted too much, and wanted it for purposes of which few husbands could approve. His temper was uncertain, and there was a fair amount of bickering and quarrels. Mr. Rattenbury also talked a great deal about committing suicide; but one evening when his wife, bored by mere talk, challenged him to proceed to action in the matter, Mr. Rattenbury evidently saw the error of his words, for he blacked her eye for her. With pardonable exasperation Mrs. Rattenbury retaliated by biting the arm that struck her, and thought so highly of her black eye that she called in her doctor at midnight to attend to it and kept it in bed for three days.
The doctor’s opinion, as expressed later, was that Mr. Rattenbury was “a very charming, quiet man”, and it must therefore have been something of a surprise to him to see the havoc this charming, quiet man had wrought. However, he refrained, with or without an effort, from asking any questions as to what might have made the quiet charm temporarily slip, and proceeded to dress Mrs. Rattenbury’s wounds. After that he gave her a quarter of a grain of morphia to quieten her (one may imagine that she needed quietening), and then went downstairs to remonstrate with the forceful sexagenarian. It appeared, however, that Mr. Rattenbury had gone back on his blow, for he had left the house still threatening suicide. The doctor, who seems to have revised his optimistic opinion of Mr. Rattenbury by this time, thought seriously enough of the incident to inform the police. (It may be worth mentioning that the quarter-grain of morphia gave Mrs. Rattenbury eight hours’ sound sleep, and that when the doctor saw her the next morning she was peaceful and calm: one of those small points, so insignificant at the time, which assume an unexpected importance later.)
It is upon little snapshots such as this that an appreciation must always be based of the everyday life in a household to which murder comes later, usually as a quite unexpected visitor; but it must not be forgotten that such snapshots show the high lights only. Eyes were not being blacked in the Villa Madeira every day.
It was almost every other day, however, that the doctor was being called in. Between March 1934 and February 1935 he saw Mrs. Rattenbury at least seventy times, with fees amounting to over fifty guineas. In his evidence the doctor was a little cautious about the reasons for these visits, and many of them appear to have followed a summons due to excitability, temperament, or any other upsetting cause. Mrs. Rattenbury’s motto, in fact, seems to have been: when in a tantrum, send for the doctor. She had, however, been genuinely suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis since 1932, and in that year she was sent to a nursing-home for a fortnight’s observation.
This doctor was not only Mrs. Rattenbury’s medical attendant for two and a half years but something of a family friend, and his is the only outside evidence we have of the conditions and temperaments at the Villa Madeira. It is interesting, therefore, to learn that Mr. Rattenbury had mentioned many times to the doctor his wish to commit suicide; so that it seems established that this “very charming, quiet man” had a definitely morbid streak in him—except, no doubt, late at night, as we shall see.
Concerning Mrs. Rattenbury the doctor sounds a little careful. His description of her temperament as ‘uneven’ strikes one as a kindly understatement, and under pressure he amended this to ‘excitable’; and he attributed her sudden fits of excitement sometimes to too much alcohol and sometimes “if there were any upset or she was cross”.
“So when she was cross or there was an upset, she sent for you, did she?” asked counsel; and the doctor agreed that “if it was necessary” she did so. This seems a perfect little picture of an excitable, rather silly woman, and it fits nicely with Miss Riggs’ equally graphic remark that Mrs. Rattenbury “ran about a good deal”.
However, reading between the lines of the doctor’s evidence, one gathers the impression that in spite of her tantrums he liked Mrs. Rattenbury as a person, and he emphasized her devotion to her children, particularly to little John.
On the whole, however, notwithstanding a very infrequent black eye and a less infrequent tantrum or two, the relations of Mr. and Mrs. Rattenbury at this time (1934) were not unfriendly; and when asked at her trial if her married life had been happy, Mrs. Rattenbury threw out her hand and said simply: “Like that”. At the same time she admitted frankly that she had not loved her husband and, if he had wanted his rights as a husband in March 1935, she would not have been willing to give them to him. Taking it by and large, then, married life at the Villa Madeira up till 1935 must have been, below the surface, much the same as married life in any other British villa where a lady with a temperament was living with a husband old enough to be her father.
That surface was, however, definitely different.
For one thing, the Rattenburys kept a chef, a figure that must be rare in the smaller villas of Britain. (There was no chef employed after Stoner was engaged; and one of the minor mysteries about this strange household is: Who did the cooking? Presumably Miss Irene Riggs, along with all the rest of the work of the house; but this seems a curious descent from the glory of a chef.) Another point of difference between the Villa Madeira and other villas was the amount of drink consumed.
Perhaps we begin to see here why the Rattenburys’ standard of living was not up to their income. There may have been method in Mr. Rattenbury’s meanness. What they saved on the rent they could spend on drink. Both Mr. and Mrs. Rattenbury had a weakness for the bottle.
Mrs. Rattenbury’s preference was for cocktails and wine; and it is depressing, but at the same time illuminating, to learn that the cocktails consumed at the Villa Madeira were bought ready-made. Anyone who has sampled the usual ready-made cocktail, consisting of almost undiluted Italian vermouth, will understand why this information should be depressing. Its illumination lies in showing that Mrs. Rattenbury evidently drank cocktails for the sake of drinking cocktails and not for any finer points, such as flavour. We have no information about the wine that was drunk at the Villa Madeira, and possibly we are spared some rather hideous knowledge.
Mrs. Rattenbury did not drink steadily, but in bouts. In her own somewhat peculiar words: “My life with Mr. Rattenbury was so what you call monotonous that at times I used to take too many cocktails to bring up one’s spirits—take them to excess.” Mr. Rattenbury, on the other hand, stuck to whisky, and appears to have drunk it in doses as regular as they were large. “He always was jolly, late at night,” said his wife of him in her evidence, and this almost casual remark is interesting. To keep up the practice over years of becoming ‘jolly’ every night will need larger and larger quantities of whisky. By the time one is sixty-seven it will need a very large amount indeed. One may safely say, therefore, that Mr. Rattenbury was an exceptionally heavy drinker.
Besides Mr. and Mrs. Rattenbury and their small son, the only other occupant of the household in 1934 was Miss Irene Riggs, the ‘maid-companion’—or perhaps it should be ‘companion-help’. Miss Riggs in any case was not quite in the position of a servant. She was on terms of intimate friendship with Mrs. Rattenbury, who called her ‘darling’, and she found the household an ‘extremely pleasant’ one.
Miss Riggs did, however, consider its atmosphere “just a little unusual”, though she did not find it strange that Mrs. Rattenbury should have the habit of patrolling the garden late at night in her pyjamas, or stay up all night long playing the piano or the gramophone. And here Miss Riggs artlessly voiced a profound truth of human nature. Had she from the fastness of her own bed heard Mrs. Rattenbury making this music downstairs in the sitting-room all night long, Miss Riggs would doubtless have thought it very queer indeed; but, in fact, she found it quite normal and ordinary, “because I used to be with her”. It is always the things that other people do which are queer, never the things one does oneself.
It is necessary to keep this truth constantly in the mind for a proper understanding of the protagonist here (the court regarded Mrs. Rattenbury as the protagonist in this domestic drama, although it was not her hand which wielded the mallet, and we may as well accept the court’s ruling). We may find the things that Mrs. Rattenbury did very strange and queer. To Mrs. Rattenbury herself they would appear not merely ordinary but inevitable, simply because it was she who was doing them.
Mrs. Rattenbury was a woman of some small culture—though some of her turns of phrase were a little odd. At any rate she had had a musical education of a sort, and between bouts she used to compose songs, with which under the pseudonym of ‘Lozanne’ she had had a certain success. She was also probably ‘artistic’, if one could be sure what that horrible word exactly means.
This, then, was the household which George Percy Stoner entered in September 1934; ignorant then, no doubt, of the terms upon which he was doing so.
Now habits, good or bad, must not be confused with character. They are not always even a reflection of character any more than accomplishments are. Bad habits, in fine, do not necessarily mean a bad character.
Mrs. Rattenbury had one or two unfortunate habits, just as she had two or three unfortunate characteristics. Her mode of life, which she herself, of course, found perfectly normal, caused a British judge and jury subsequently to shudder. She, undoubtedly, was what the British lower middle-class would call a ‘bad’ woman. And calling her this, they would, in the usual wholesale way, deny her any redeeming qualities at all.
And no doubt so far as the petty vices go, the little vices of the body, we may all join in righteous condemnation of Mrs. Rattenbury. We may hold up pious hands of horror that a woman could drink too many cocktails, seduce a possibly innocent lad, smoke too many cigarettes, and all the rest of it. But these things are not the worst in the world. The personal vices, which leave any other individual untouched, are only minor ones; it is those which involve hurt, spiritual or physical, to another person that are the important ones. It may be argued, as indeed it was in court, that Mrs. Rattenbury by becoming his mistress caused definite hurt to Stoner, and we shall consider this question later. Here it is enough to say that, even if this is true, the damage done was completely unconscious; and that does make a difference.
For without in any way defending or excusing this woman and her foolishness, one must in honesty say that in the greater vices, the mean vices of the spirit, she seems to have been completely lacking. She was, on the contrary, in this respect rather fine: impulsively generous on the whole; and allowing for her temperament, unselfish; truthful; so far as one can judge, honest; and certainly kind-hearted. To sand the sugar, to overwork an underpaid apprentice, to lend money on oppressive terms, to bully the weak, to terrify the timid, to cheat one’s neighbour within the law: all these things are worse than drinking too many cocktails—worse even than hiring a young lout to satisfy the urgings of an over-ardent nature. So let the many citizens of credit and blameless renown, who habitually indulge these spiritual vices, think twice before they condemn the merely physical ones. (But, of course, they will not think even once.)
After all, everyone who came into contact with Mrs. Rattenbury seems to have liked her at once, and gone on liking her; and that is not only sound evidence of character but a thing that few of us can say of ourselves.
Above all, let those frigid souls who, having only feeble ones of their own, consider that all sexual promptings are a matter of deliberate choice by a vicious nature, or at least are subject to easy control, try to realize that all people are not like themselves. This is the official attitude towards all questions of sex in our Criminal Courts, and it is a regrettable one.
For it was this unkindness of Nature which was to prove fatal to Mrs. Rattenbury, and this almost alone. And it must be admitted that here Mrs. Rattenbury had bad luck. Even in a country notorious for its female frigidity, there are plenty of exceptions; but warm blood brings few of its possessors to the dock on a charge of murder.
For Mrs. Rattenbury was, to put it at its lowest, a highly-sexed woman. She was also an attractive one, and she was married to an elderly and possibly impotent husband. For six years she and her husband had occupied separate rooms. The situation must have been irksome to her. So after bearing it as long as she could, she followed the example of her betters and advertised for a chauffeur. It may be taken for granted that she looked over the applicants with a more than usually critical eye.
The successful candidate for this dual post was George Percy Stoner, a youth of seventeen and a half, lustier than he looked, the son of a bricklayer. Whether or no Stoner intentionally deceived Mrs. Rattenbury about his age, she certainly did not realize when she engaged him that he was so young. However that may be, in September 1934 young Stoner entered on his nominal duties as chauffeur, which consisted chiefly in driving the small boy to and from school every day, at a salary of £1 a week. On November 22nd he embarked on his real job, and became Mrs. Rattenbury’s lover, at no official increase in salary. Whatever his capabilities in the former rôle, there is reason to believe than in the latter he was more than satisfactory.
Stoner was a lad whose physical properties as an adult outstripped his mental ones. As a child he had been backward in everything. He could not walk until he was three; he was anything but brilliant at his lessons, and indeed had very little schooling; his health was indifferent. As a boy he had few friends, and those younger than himself. It is significant that, at his trial, the only evidence of character called on his behalf was that of close relations, which has little value. However, it was plain that in his post at the Villa Madeira he worked hard at his new duties; for his parents noticed that by Christmas he had become much paler, his eyes sunken and his face drawn.
