Ill Met by Gaslight: Five Edinburgh Murders (12 page)

On the evening of Thursday 15 August he was taken in a coach from the Jail to the Lock-up House in the Royal Mile. Despite the usual precaution a crowd of sightseers spotted him. He remarked that they might have had something better to do with their time and trotted smartly from the coach to his night’s lodging. Throughout the journey he had shown himself amenable and good-humoured, though a note of selfabasement readily crept in. `Oh you may do anything you like with me, and put chains round my neck if you like’, he said to the warders who were apologising for having to bind him.

Outside, a crowd began to gather before it was dark. An execution was something rare enough, and there was fun to be had even from watching the erection of the gallows. It was observed that the crowd attracted came from the poorer parts of the city and was disposed to levity. The next morning though a better social balance was to be achieved.

Bennison prayed, slept and woke to pray again. He ate a good breakfast. His mood was seen to be calm and serene, prepared to meet his Maker, in his own phrase `to go home’. His confession had expunged his guilt - why, he had hardly been cast down by the Home Secretary’s rejection of the Appeal. He thanked the jailers for their care and went forth to the scaffold in a manner that was almost jaunty.

Things were not quite so well organised there. The rarity of Edinburgh executions meant that there was no resident hangman. Accordingly they had called on Murdoch of Glasgow, an octogenarian. His undoubted experience did not fully compensate for the ravages of the years. He failed first of all to observe that Bennison was wearing a stock round his neck which obstructed the rope. Then when this was brought to his notice, he tried vainly to wrench it off. Bennison was driven to protest. `It has a buckle’ he was heard to cry. At last Murdoch managed to remove it and fix the rope. A last prayer and William Bennison was despatched into oblivion. The Evening Courant remarked that, `Murdoch discharged his revolting duties with even more of the callousness of his craft.’

That was a convenient, even soothing, criticism. At the very least it was a means of confronting the dilemma in which the act of public execution by now placed sensitive observers. Blame the hangman for its ugliness; deplore the passions of the mob; condemn the ghoulish interest; but satisfy this by a full and lucid account of proceedings. Such ambivalence is perhaps inescapable; it may be detected in the writing of this book. Murder and capital punishment are not matters on which it is easy to maintain a consistent and honest moral tone. Ambivalence may indeed be the most honest response. What is clear however from contemporary accounts of Bennison’s execution is no more than what one should expect. Disquiet was growing among the more intelligent and sensitive part of the public, though the attempt to disguise it or account for it seems hypocritical. Accordingly it would not be long before executions were pushed out of sight; society might still require the death penalty as a symbol of its abhorrence of murder, or as an act of simple revenge; but it would not much longer permit revenge to be exacted in the full glare of day. Revenge would cease to be a spectacle. Instead the symbol would be veiled in the mysteries of dawn and the prison yard.

Eugene Marie Chantrelle

Or the Girl who cried Wolf

`My darling Eugene, I wish I was beside you all to-day how nice it would be. Will you write darling. Believe me my darling ever your loving Lizzie.’

`Now Eugene I want you to try and believe I love you for I do love you with all my heart I do indeed. Will you not believe that? Do believe it because I really love you. It is no fancy. I feel that I love you. I cannot forget your saying that I am heartless and unfeeling. That is not true at any rate, for I am not unfeeling. Eugene you say you will not believe what I tell you so what is the use of writing only it gives me comfort if you do not believe. Believe me my darling ever your loving

Lizzie.’

`My darling Eugene,

How could you for one moment suppose I would cease loving you. Dear Eugene I really love you I am sure as much as you love me. Did you get the note I put in your coat pocket? I am very sorry I have not been able to get beside you. I have not been out, you have no idea how well I am watched. But you know dear it is a great comfort to think you are so near me. I think you had better not walk too much in the square as people will be wondering what handsome gentleman it is walking so often. I am in an awful hurry in case of Mamma. I have only written because I could not get beside you but I will try. If your windows are to the front sit at them and I will pass on the other side or wait in the stair. Believe me my own darling Eugene ever your truly loving

Lizzie. Burn this.’

Few things are less rewarding reading than the effusions of the lovelorn and ignorant, and these naive repetitive letters would have neither interest nor significance but for the unhappy sequel.

They were written by a girl of fifteen called Elizabeth Cullen Dyer. Her character may be deduced fairly enough from the letters, silly, unformed, her head empty except for the conventional phrases of romantic infatuation; she was clearly indebted to the lending library for her phraseology. At the time of writing she was, or had recently been, a pupil at a private academy in Newington, one of a good many similar establishments which had sprung up to impart manners and a veneer of accomplishment to the daughters of the bourgeoisie. Her father was a commercial traveller for various London houses, and the family belonged to that vast, spreading stratum of the Victorian middle class, a class which, perfectly happy with its lot and with the arrangement of society, saw to its children’s education, and lived in decent substantial apartments (the Dyers at this time had a flat in Buccleuch Place, a fine late eighteenth-century street, past its fashionable peak); it was a class which took touring holidays and, most importantly, which made a fetish of respectibility. The wretched Elizabeth, clearly chafing under its bonds in these letters, was to be a victim on its altar. Respectability was the great Victorian God, an idol, which demanded frequent sacrifice, generally, in the manner of such idols, of young maidens; a Moloch, which took life and granted none.

The one thing unusual about these missives was their recipient. Elizabeth might be indulging in calf-love, but her adored was a mature man, Eugene Marie Chantrelle. Yet in one sense it was not so unusual, for Chantrelle was a schoolmaster who had taught Lizzie French, and it is common enough for immature girls to develop a passionate devotion for their instructors. Moreover, since early photographs of Lizzie show a soft and dewy prettiness, it is not in turn surprising that she aroused Chantrelle’s desire.

Chantrelle had been born in Nantes in 1834. His father, who was a shipowner in that prosperous Breton port, gave his son a good education, which included a course of study at Nantes Medical School. He was later to pursue further medical studies in Strasbourg and Paris, and, for one year, much later, in Edinburgh. He called himself a medical man, and was accustomed to dispense prescriptions for family, friends and acquaintances, though he had never acquired a medical degree. However, by his own account, he could have done so at any time, `having studied medicine in the highest degree’ Chantrelle gave most people he met the impression that he did not think too badly of himself and his own capabilities.

The history of his early career is confused, more than one account having been given at different times. According to one version, he left France in consequence of Louis Napoleon’s coup in December 1851, but he also claimed to have studied medicine at Strasbourg from 1850 to 1855. Whatever the truth, and one claim must exclude the other, he certainly found it convenient and agreeable to his consequence to present himself as a political refugee. He would say he had fought on the barricades, and would then display an old sabre wound in his arm; in the right quarters - those that would admire and those that would be shocked - he would admit to having formed strong communist opinions in his youth. He travelled for some years in the United States, without ever establishing himself there; and it may be held that a man who could not achieve that in the middle of the nineteenth century was flawed in some important respect. The early 1860’s saw him established in England, in Newcastle and then in Leicester and other places, where he found employment as a teacher of his native language. In the middle of the decade he removed to Edinburgh, where, after another flirtation with medical training, he set up as a teacher of French, Latin and Greek. Though he continued, as we have seen, to describe himself as a medical man, and was always ready to prescribe for those, who, for one reason or another, wished to have nothing to do with the regular doctors, his principal energies were now devoted to instruction. He met with a good deal of immediate success. He was after all a man of the world with at least a veneer of superior culture. His manners were polished, and he enhanced his reputation by producing textbooks, sufficiently well made to be used in many schools. By the year 1867 when he met Elizabeth Dyer, he could consider that, after many vagaries, he had found a position which offered him a certain stability and standing.

These vagaries had been real enough, sufficiently serious to endanger any hopes of a respectable career. There were certainly things to be kept hidden from Lizzie and her mother. The Scotsman’s obituary was to record that while acting as tutor `in various families of the highest respectability in England, Chantrelle committed what, so far as is known, was the first outragethat brought him into the hands of the police - an outrage of a very gross nature, which would, it is believed, have been followed with penal servitude, had it not been for the high testimony to his character borne by the family with whom he had resided, and which, as it was, brought about a sentence of nine months’ imprisonment.’ Moreover, `in 1866 soon after this term of confinement was over, he came to Edinburgh, where he was guilty of an act which was nothing less than a shocking repetition of his former offence. For this heartless crime no steps were taken against him.’ The newspaper assigns no reason for such leniency; one can only assume a desire to protect his partner in this disgraceful occurrence, a partner who was probably a minor. Thus early in his carrer did respectability help to shield vice and crime.

Lizzie was not the only girl he is known to have seduced. There was another, a governess called Lucy Holmes, seduced in his lodging one New Year’s Day, and then abandoned. She wrote pathetically to him from Cromer that summer:

`… What happened in your house on the 1st of January, and how you shielded my fears, by assuring me that nothing would result from what you had done, which I in my simplicity fully believed, but now I find that you have been deceiving me all the time, if not yourself as well. Think for a moment what you would feel were your only sister to be treated as you have treated me…’

The appeal was vain. Chantrelle, not surprisingly, was proof against such pathos, unmoved by the thought of what his emotions might have been had his putative sister been similarly abused; he could bear such reflections with the most stoical equanimity.

Yet, even if such rumours surrounded him, they only added to his attractions. There can be no doubt he was an object of glamour to the girls he taught. A photograph taken in 1867 shows a well set-up man, with a straight nose, high forehead, brown and gently waving hair. The great Dundreary whiskers cannot quite disguise a suggestion of humour. He looks the very model of a Victorian hero, a maiden’s dream, and it is likely that Elizabeth Dyer was not the only girl at school to think so. It was equally unsurprising that her parents did not share her enthusiasm, or even like the association. Their reasons were clear enough. Chantrelle was a foreigner. He was, at thirty-four, just twice Elizabeth’s age. They knew nothing of his family, and nothing of his early life, beyond what he condescended to impart. Very probably they found it hard to know how much of this they should believe, for Chantrelle had no low opinion of his capacity, was inclined therefore to be a braggart, and was extremely vague as to dates, and cavalier in his regard of fact. He was to state, in his first Declaration to the magistrates, for instance that, `I was married to my late wife on 2nd August, 1868. I had made her acquaintance about eighteen months previously. She was then a pupil of mine at Mr McLachlan’s school in Arniston Place. She was then fourteen or fifteen years of age. She was sixteen when we were married, but I forget when her birthday was…

But he went on immediately to say, `no attachment was formed between us until I became aquainted with her family, which was eighteen months or two years after I became acquainted with herself …’ and then, `I knew my wife as my pupil for about two years before our marriage and also for about a year during which I courted her after she left school our acquaintance before marriage being in all about three years.’

All that was confusing enough, especially as there is no evidence that Chantrelle was teaching in Edinburgh as early as 1865. (Mrs Dyer by the way put the date of the wedding as 11, not 2 August.)

Whatever her family’s doubts, Elizabeth was besotted with Chantrelle. She made as much of the running as he did, and she was only too ready to throw herself at his feet:

`Oh Eugene you do not know how I love you. I could never bear anyone to kiss and pet me. If it was broken off I should die. You think perhaps I do not mean it but really I could not live without your love….’ … `I feel my love increasing daily as I am never content but with you … you do not know how intensely I love you far more than I did … I want you to ask them to let me come to school for French as we will be out together walking. How different it will be when we are married we shall have no one to bother us … I wish I had you here, but as it is impossible at present I send you kisses without number….’

It is hard, as in all such cases, to determine how far Elizabeth was merely responding to her notion of what a young girl should write to her lover - the stereotype of passion is evidently there. All the same one cannot fail a detect a note of sincerity sounding through the stock phrases and self-dramatisation. Lizzie was certainly fixed on her prey.