Notman trial captivated city in 1868
Adaptation from Portrait of a Scandal: The Abortion Trial of Robert Notman by Elaine Kalman Naves.
February 1868. In summer it was a city of bucolic outskirts, with melons, strawberries, and sweet corn grown in back yards. By contrast, the downtown streets hummed with sidewalk vendors touting ice cream and cool drinks to a perspiring public garbed in the tight stays and high collars dictated by propriety.
But winter was its true calling, its season par excellence. It was a city of snow, ice, and tinkling sleigh bells, built on the banks of a river with prodigious currents. Every year the St. Lawrence froze solidly enough to form a bridge of ice linking Montreal to the mainland. A pathway marked by fir branches guided travellers along the treacherous route of irregular slopes and snow dunes.
It was a city of domes and spires — “a mountain of churches,” according to Harriet Beecher Stowe. An actual, if small, mountain rose at its heart. You could shoot foxes on that mountain, or toboggan down its flanks, or scale it on snowshoes by torchlight.
As a place to live, it was hardly idyllic: a city of ice shoves, ice jams, and spring floods, of cholera and smallpox. Its wooden sidewalks were hazardous and dirty, it was prone to fire, and its plumbing was a disaster. For several days in a row at the end of that February, ice up river blocked the aqueduct near the Lachine Rapids, depleting the reservoir on the mountainside and leaving the city without running water.
It was a city of social, linguistic, religious, and architectural disparities. It had streets of squalid little frame houses that reminded one Montrealer of “an Irishman’s hovel on his native bog.” But the shacks stood in the shadow of “great streets of great houses, all of finecut stone.” This indigenous grey limestone resembled the building blocks of parts of France and Scotland, a likeness that must have been comforting to those of its many citizens of French and Scots heritage.
It was a city of fur barons and clergymen, of nuns and belles, of British garrison officers, merchants, factory owners and labourers. On its streets strolled offspring of the early French settlers and more recently arrived immigrants from the British Isles. But you could not overlook the presence of the “unmistakable descendants of the ancient Iroquois Indians” either. And there were other unusual minorities. A few days before this story begins, the Jews of the English and German Synagogue inaugurated a new Torah scroll in a splendid ceremony that was reported in rich detail by an awestruck reporter for the The Gazette.
It was a city like and unlike other cities in and out of its time, peopled by individuals cast in their own specificity, possessing their own unique dreams and terrors. The dreams and terrors of Dr. Alfred Patton became fodder for gossip in the late winter of 1868. A young Irishman who had served with distinction as a ship’s surgeon with the Montreal Ocean Steamship Company, he hung up his shingle on Craig Street, near Place d’Armes Hill in October 1867. Hard-working and popular, within weeks he established “a fair practice.” So said The Gazette of February 28, 1868, as it announced his sudden death “under painful circumstances.” Painful, indeed: Dr. Patton was all of 28.
This obituary was merely a prologue to what would become known as the “Notman Case,” or “The Abortion Case.” The subsequent inquest and autopsy found that Dr. Patton had taken poison. In a matter of days, a police investigation led to the conclusion that he had killed himself.
One of Dr. Patton’s patients was a certain Margaret Galbraith, whom he treated in the middle of December and again the night that he died. Miss Galbraith had recently served as companion to Mrs. William Notman, the elderly mother of Montreal’s most successful photographer.
The successful photographer had arrived in the city little more than a decade earlier. Unlike Dr. Patton, who appeared to have everything going for him, William Notman fled his native Scotland under a cloud, on the lam from the law. The doubtful accounting methods he and his father used in the family wholesale cloth business had backfired on them, forcing them into bankruptcy. The father spent some months in debtors’ prison, while the future photographer was, according to Scots law, “fugitated”: declared a fugitive from justice and his property seized by the crown.
Along with his younger brother Robert, William headed for Montreal, drawn by the burgeoning city’s reputation for making the fortunes of go-getting Scotsmen. Soon after their arrival in the summer of 1856, they found work at the dry-goods merchants Ogilvy & Lewis. Then, in the slow winter season, William’s employers granted him a loan by which he could try to set himself up as a photographer.
Driven to achieve and to repair the damage to the family name, Notman rose with mercurial speed in his new profession. Within a short interval, he secured a commission from the Grand Trunk Railway Company to photograph the last stages of the construction of the Victoria Bridge. Brilliantly executed, the photographs managed to attract royal attention, and Notman began calling himself “Photographer to the Queen.” By the early 1860s, Notman had completely rehabilitated himself. He would eventually own the largest photography business in North America. But “the painful circumstances” of the death of Dr. Patton cast new shadows on the refurbished Notman name. On February 22, a Saturday, Miss Galbraith told her land lady that she would be spending the evening at Mrs. Notman’s. But she never returned to her rooming house, nor did she turn up on Monday for classes at the McGill Normal School, where she was studying to be a teacher.
Reporting on the ongoing police investigation into the death of Dr. Patton, the Montreal Herald speculated that he had been performing an abortion and, apparently, “by that wicked and dangerous practice, he had brought the unfortunate woman with whose life he was tampering, to the point of death.”
The Gazette was far less circumspect in its report of March 4. “The authorities are very reticent yet, although the whole affair is in everybody’s mouth, but the following facts transpired in the course of yesterday. It appears that Mr. Robert Notman, of this city, seduced a girl named Galbraith some time ago. The first intimation of the affair was that Galbraith was missing from her boarding house in Lagauchetiere Street. The assistance of a detective was obtained, but she could not be found. Finally her trunk was searched, and letters were found said to implicate Mr. R. Notman.”
The paper went on to relate how Robert had taken a suite at the St. Lawrence Hall, Montreal’s best hotel, “where for some days certain drugs had been unsuccessfully administered to her, and eventually an operation is said to have been performed on her the effect of which reduced her to such a state of distress and exhaustion that her life was despaired of, and this preying on Dr. Patton’s mind, induced him, there is now reason to believe, to commit suicide.”
But Margaret Galbraith had not died, though the public disgrace sparked by Patton’s suicide might well have caused her to wish she had. A police magistrate interviewed her on her sickbed and the paper passed on the graphic details. “She testified that Dr. Patton had committed an abortion upon her, that she was delivered at 7 o’clock on the morning previous to his death; that the child she gave birth to, as well as the after birth, were removed in a bucket by the doctor.” It’s little wonder that in the city the Notman name was on every lip. There must have been some uncertainty among readers as to which Notman was the culprit, because a couple of weeks later, The Gazette sought to clear up the confusion. “Yesterday Robert Notman was finally committed for trial at the approaching term of the Court of Queen’s Bench on three distinct terms of abortion. The person committed is not the well-known photographer, whose name is William Notman.”
Born in Paisley, Scotland, in 1837, Robert came to Montreal at age 19 with William, who was 11 years his senior. William paved his way, first by finding him employment at Ogilvy & Lewis, and then by giving him work in his studio. At first all went swimmingly. But a few months after marrying Annie Birks, sister of silversmith Henry Birks, the future founder of the iconic jewelry emporium, in July 1861, Robert was thrown out of the Zion Congregational Church “for repeated and deliberate lying.” (Oh, to know why!) Annie died in childbirth in 1864, leaving Robert a widower and the father of a baby girl at 27.
Three years later, he seduced Margaret Galbraith. And when she became pregnant, instead of doing the obvious — marrying her and providing his little girl with a mother, a most conventional act for the time — he stood by her in the oddest of ways. For he could have washed his hands of her and let her face, alone, the shame of bearing a bastard. Rather, he did all he could to save her reputation by supplying her first with drugs and when those failed, by the agency of Dr. Patton, an “operation using instruments.” Robert Notman’s trial began on April 20 and took the better part of a week. Both the medical and legal evidence were complex and convoluted. At the outset, the judge had the room cleared of “all women and young people,” and expressed the pious wish for no “scandalous scenes” or “disgusting details.”
The case hinged on the crime of terminating a pregnancy. Since the abortionist himself was dead and the law did not hold the woman in question to account, its full weight bore down upon Robert. He was charged with “feloniously counselling, procuring and commanding” Dr. Patton to administer Margaret “a noxious thing” in the form of a substance called ergot of rye. It called on many prominent and colourful Montrealers to testify, and starred three of the finest jurists of the day: Bernard Devlin for the defence, Thomas Kennedy Ramsay for the prosecution and Justice Lewis Thomas Drummond on the bench.
Abortion was a hot-button issue at the time, arguably even more so than today. Judge Drummond called it a “moral epidemic … coming up in our midst.” The “coming up” was a reference to Canada’s southern neighbour, where a noticeable trend in the reduction of the number of children in middle-class families had alerted authorities that married women were using abortion for contraception. As a result, warned the judge, “a moral cancer … is slowly eating its way into this and other cities of the Dominion.”
Yet he had nothing but compassion for Margaret Galbraith, whose beauty, intelligence and brave comportment during the trial he particularly commended. For Robert, however, he had no use. When, after considerable prodding, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty, Drummond threw the book at him, sentencing him to a shocking ten years of hard labour in Kingston penitentiary.
Upon the conclusion of the trial, The Canada Medical Journal ran an editorial feature that — if one reads between the lines — suggests that abortion was making gains in Canada and probably being practised by reputable physicians like Dr. Patton, as well as by stereotypical back-street quacks. The article expressed a degree of sympathy for Robert Notman — “a person of some social position” — and to declare the judge’s sentence too harsh. “We know it for a fact that more than one person occupying a position equal to that of Notman’s would have been today in a position similar to his had it not been for the warning given them of the crime they intended to commit. … There are few medical men, in Montreal at all events, who have not been at least once in their lives solicited to procure an abortion, the person so soliciting having no idea that he ran any risk worth speaking.”
Indeed the case would be appealed, its ins and outs taking serpentine turns. The story of Margaret Galbraith and Robert Notman was far from over when the shackled prisoner was transported to Kingston Penitentiary in May 1868.
Portrait of a Scandal: The Abor
tion Trial of Robert Notman is forthcoming from Véhicule Press. Elaine Kalman Naves is an awardwinning Montreal writer, journalist and broadcaster. Visit her website at ElaineKalmanNaves.com