How the real-life Holmes and Watson solved a baffling murder mystery
HISTORY
THE ARDLAMONT MYSTERY by Daniel Smith (Michael O’Mara £18.99)
ON THE morning of August 10, 1893, three men set out on a hunting excur-sion from Ardlamont House, an imposing Geor-gian pile in Argyll.
Only two of them would return alive. The third man was found by a ditch, blood oozing from a wound behind his right ear.
His companions said he had accidentally shot himself. But had he?
The incident has become known as ‘The Ardlamont Mystery’. The trial that followed, as Daniel Smith’s intriguing book makes clear, remains one of the most controversial in Scottish legal history. The dead man was Cecil Hambrough, a 20-year-old army lieutenant who was due to inherit substantial property interests when he came of age the following year.
His two fellow hunters were his friend and former tutor Alfred Monson, and a supposed engineer from London going by the name of Mr Scott.
At first the police believed it was an accident. But doubts soon began to arise. Scott, it turned out, was not an engineer but a dodgy bookie with a string of aliases. He had also dis-appeared without trace.
Nor was Monson quite the paragon of upper-class virtue he seemed at first. A school he owned had burned to the ground in suspicious circumstances. He had walked away with the insurance money.
He and his wife had a long history of incurring debts then disappear-ing, leaving their creditors unpaid. He had even been tried for fraud, but was acquitted. Then the police learned that insurance policies on Ham-brough’s life had recently been taken out and the beneficiaries were the Monsons. They began to smell a rat. Hambrough’s body was exhumed and his wounds re-examined. Monson was arrested and charged with his murder. But did he do it? As one newspaper put it, ‘The death of young Mr Hambrough affords exactly the sort of problem which Mr Sherlock Holmes is wont to solve so prettily’. Luckily, two of the models for Sherlock Holmes were on hand. Joseph Bell, a surgeon and lecturer at the Edinburgh School of Medicine, has long been recog-nised as the inspiration behind Conan Doyle’s famous character. When he was a student in Edinburgh, the author worked with Bell. He later wrote to him, ‘It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes’. The detective’s powers mirrored Bell’s uncanny ability to extract information from his patients by closely observing them. On one occasion, Bell claimed that he could tell from a patient’s demeanour that he had once been in a Highland regiment. The man denied it. Bell insisted he was right. Later, when the patient removed his shirt and jacket, he noticed a small blue letter ‘D’ branded into the man’s chest. ‘D’ for ‘Deserter’. Bell was correct. The man had not wanted to admit to his history in the army. Daniel Smith argues that another Edinburgh medical man also had a role in the creation of Sherlock Holmes. Like Bell, Henry Littlejohn was a surgeon and lecturer on medicine. Conan Doyle never explicitly stated that he drew on him for Holmes, but Smith makes a good case that he did.
BELL and Littlejohn were regularly called as expert witnesses in murder trials. In one case even the murderer acknowledged their skills. Eugene Chantrelle, about to hang for killing his wife, spoke his final words to Littlejohn.
‘Bye, bye, doctor,’ he is reported to have said. ‘Don’t forget to give my compliments to Joe Bell. You both did a good job in bringing me to the scaffold.’
In the Monson case, Bell and Littlejohn both contended that it was impossible Cecil Hambrough could have accidentally shot himself. He could only have been murdered.
Did the jury believe them? It would be unfair to reveal whether the verdict was ‘Guilty’, ‘Not Guilty’ or the peculiarly Scottish one of ‘Not Proven’.
But Daniel Smith’s book provides an enthralling real-life murder mystery that also sheds new light on the creation of fiction’s most famous detective.