Ruislip & Eastcote & Northwood Gazette
DID CHRISTIE CRACK POISONING MYSTERY?
Agathie Christie’s theory on a famous unsolved murder case is included in new book, Poisoned at the Priory. Its author, ANTONY M BROWN, investigates
DID Queen of Crime writing Agatha Christie solve one of Britain’s most notorious unsolved murders? The year is 1876. Queen Victoria is on the throne, Britain is the world’s economic superpower and Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone.
The place is Balham, a quiet locality to the south west of central London, bounded by swathes of open countryside.
Travelling west, you reach a white, castellated building.
The Priory is home to a newlywed couple, ambitious lawyer Mr Charles Bravo and his wealthy wife Florence, in addition to a dozen servants. This picture of upper middle-class sensibility would have escaped history’s gaze were it not for dramatic events that transpired during the spring and summer.
On the night of April
18, Charles collapsed in agony. He had somehow ingested a rare poison, and despite the attendance of no less than six doctors, it exacted a horrific toll on his young body. Three days later, he was dead.
His wife’s contention that her husband had committed suicide was supported by the testimony of Mrs Cox, her lady’s companion, who told the doctors that before his collapse Charles had declared to her: “I have taken poison, don’t tell Florence.”
However, the lawyer’s friends and family insisted that the hard-nosed, high-spirited man would never have taken his own life. The subsequent coroner’s inquest returned an open verdict – the jury did not accept the suicide theory but failed to agree on what had happened. However, one fact did emerge: Charles Bravo had ingested a massive dose of antimony, an unusual poison, as toxic as arsenic.
Administered in tiny doses, it was sometimes used to poison a victim over a long period. However, even small amounts trigger violent vomiting, the poison expelled before it is absorbed by the body. There was not a single known case of murder, or suicide, by such a large dose. So how had the young barrister been poisoned with antimony?
It was another two weeks before details of the mysterious poisoning reached the press. In particular, it was reported that Mrs Cox had waited nearly five hours before telling doctors of Charles ‘alleged confession. The inquest was exposed as a farce, with key witnesses not called and important questions left unanswered. Unlike everyone else in the household, Florence and Mrs Cox had not given written statements. Pressure built, and in early June the two women finally provided their statements, in which Mrs Cox dropped a bombshell. She claimed that Charles had in fact told her: “I have taken poison for Dr Gully, don’t tell Florence.” Dr Gully was an eminent doctor with whom Florence had engaged in a sexual affair before meeting Charles. He was married and more than twice her age and suspicions lingered that the romance might not have ended. Although Mrs Cox’s bombshell provided a possible reason for Charles to commit suicide – to chivalrously allow Florence to return to her supposed true love – it also suggested a motive for murder. Worse, because Mrs Cox had not mentioned this to the coroner, the initial inquest was quashed and a new one ordered.
If the first inquest was a farce, the second was a circus. Over three weeks during the hot summer, large crowds descended on Balham, the nation hooked by the strange death and its salacious back story. To the calloused eye of Victorian morals, her affair with a man twice her age appeared to provoke more outrage than the fact she might have murdered her husband. Yet, like an Agatha Christie thriller, there were other suspects: Mrs Cox, who feared Charles was about to sack her from her well-paid position at The Priory; Dr Gully, the former paramour, perhaps wanting to rekindle his relationship with Florence; and at least one disaffected servant sacked by Charles only months before. A coachman who regularly used antimony to treat horse parasites.
All were grilled at the new inquest. It was established that antimony was most likely in Charles’ drinking water in his bedroom, yet the new jury did not believe that Charles was responsible for his own death, either intentionally or accidentally.
Instead, the second inquest sensationally found that he had been wilfully murdered by person or persons unknown.
So who killed Charles Bravo? That question has remained unanswered for nearly 150 years, with armchair detectives poring over the cold case. Even Christie wrote about it a few years before her death. Her account is published in full for the first time in my new book, Poisoned at The Priory. She was convinced that Dr Gully was the poisoner. Her theory is ingenious, but is it correct?
After all, in her brilliant fiction she had form for pointing the finger at a dodgy doctor.
Christie believed that Dr Gully prescribed some medicine for Charles, who was suffering from neuralgia and rheumatism, and one pill in the bottle was laced with antimony. It was like Russian roulette – it was just a matter of time until he swallowed the fatal pill, she believed.
Yet nothing is what it seems in this case. Antimony was a strange choice for a doctor: it is an unreliable poison. There was a recorded case in which a person ingested 10 times the amount Charles did and survived. He was so sick, he threw off all the poison.
Along with other theories, Christie’s solution is reconstructed and examined in Poisoned at The Priory. Was she correct? You can be the judge of that.
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