Wales’ real-life Agatha Christie mystery
The Poisonous Solicitor takes a new look at a century-old case that inspired the crime writers of its day – and its author may have uncovered the truth about Hay-on-Wye’s murderous solicitor, writes Jenny White...
AuTHOR’S nOTeS
IT HAS all the makings of a classic Agatha Christie whodunnit, but Stephen Bates’ new book The Poisonous Solicitor is a true story. Bates, a national newspaper journalist with 10 successful books behind him, spent lockdown investigating a famous murder case from the 1920s that ended with a Hay-on-Wye solicitor being hanged for murdering his wife with arsenic.
During the trial there were many shocking revelations – including allegations that the suspect, Major Herbert Armstrong, had tried to murder a rival solicitor, Oswald Martin, with an arsenic-laced scone and that he had sent the Martin family a box of poisoned chocolates.
The case made international headlines and inspired novelists of the time, including Dorothy L Sayers, whose book Strong Poison echoes the Armstrong case and who mentioned the case in her novel Unnatural Death. But did Armstrong do it? Having read previous books that came to very different conclusions, Stephen Bates decided it was time to do his own investigation.
“It had been a source of fascination for me over quite a number of years,” he says on the phone from his home in Kent. “When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, the Sunday Express, which my parents took, always had a big double page spread on horrible murders and I think that’s probably when I first heard about the story.
“It is a fascinating story, because it’s a sort of true crime template for the type of novels that Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and various other sort of 1920s thriller writers were beginning to develop – and it’s a slice of 1920s life from various perspectives.”
Major Herbert Armstrong was a small, bespectacled man who liked to wax his moustache. For many years he was apparently happily married to his wife Katherine, who had been a schoolteacher. They had three children and settled in Hay-on-Wye, where Armstrong became one of the town’s solicitors.
“They were apparently terribly happily married and devoted to each other,” says Bates. “Then World War I broke out and Armstrong had been in the Territorial Army so he joined up and served behind a desk for war. When he came back, it seems that Katherine had started developing what seems like depression.
“In 1920, she was put in an asylum at Gloucester for a few months. She was brought back in early 1921, not completely cured but much better. But within a month, she steadily deteriorated. She was
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Anne still having delusions and she became more and more ill and eventually died about a month after she got home.”
Katherine was buried and life in Hay-on-Wye went on more or less as normal until the infamous scone incident. Armstrong had become embroiled in a local property dispute and solicitor Oswald Martin (whose father-in-law was the local chemist) was representing the other side.
One day Armstrong invited Martin to his house for tea, where he fed him a scone. When Martin got home, he was very sick and his father-in-law, becoming suspicious, mentioned that Armstrong had been buying a lot of arsenic from him. In those days you could buy arsenic from chemist shops to use as weedkiller and pesticide, so Armstrong’s actions could have been innocent – but then there was the mystery box of chocolates that had been sent anonymously to Martin and his family.
Martin’s sister-in-law had become very ill after eating one of the chocolates, so they were sent off to be examined. They contained arsenic. That was enough for the authorities to take action. An investigation was launched, Katherine’s body was exhumed (it was found to contain arsenic) and the case went to trial.
“The judge was clearly out to get Armstrong – he ignored the defence case and praised the prosecution case, and the local farmers of Herefordshire on the jury took 48 minutes to decide that Armstrong had done it,” says Bates.
“He was sentenced to death and taken back to Gloucester prison and hanged and most people thought that was his just deserts. But there were lots of holes in the case and a lot of local people in Hay thought that he been badly done by.”
These uncertainties drove Bates to make a thorough re-examination of the case. As soon as lockdown eased, he travelled to Hay-on-Wye to visit the key locations. Then he hit the jackpot – he was given access to boxes of papers that had been kept by Armstrong’s defence solicitor, whose offices still exist in Hereford.
“They had five boxes’ worth. They hadn’t thrown anything away for 100 years, so there were statements, letters, transcripts and newspaper cuttings. There were worried letters from Armstrong’s children saying they hoped to see him soon.
“One of the narratives in the newspaper accounts at the time was that he’d been a hard or negligent father, but these letters absolutely give the lie to that. The children were obviously deeply, deeply anxious, upset and concerned.”
He also went to the National Archives at Kew in London, where he found four boxes of papers – and some of those papers sent his investigation in a whole new direction. You’ll have to read the book to find out what he discovered, but it casts the case in a new light, making a thrilling end to a
meticulously researched, gripping true crime book.
“I think for people who are interested in true crime, it’s a wonderfully ripe story,” says Bates. “It also tells a lot about what Britain was like as a country in the 1920s. It’s a period that gets overlooked after World War I. People tend to think of flappers and the Jazz Age and assume every everything was fine – but, in fact, it was a very uncertain time.”
Perhaps one uncertainty – the question of Armstrong’s guilt or innocence – will be cleared up at last by Bates’ fascinating book.
■ Stephen Bates will be hosting a guided tour of the locations that feature in the book as part of this year’s Hay Festival from Thursday, May 26 to Sunday, June 5. The Poisonous Solicitor by Stephen Bates is out now, published by Icon Books 5.
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