George Edalji - WikiHQ

George Ernest Thompson Edalji (22 January 1876 – 17 June 1953) was an English solicitor and son of a vicar of Indian Parsi descent in a Staffordshire village. He became known as a victim of a miscarriage of justice, having served three years' hard labour after being convicted on a charge of injuring a pony. He was initially regarded having been responsible for the series of animal mutilations known as the Great Wyrley Outrages, but the prosecution case against him became regarded as weak and prejudiced. He was pardoned on the grounds of the conviction being an unsafe one after a campaign in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took a prominent role.

The difficulty in overturning the conviction of Edalji was cited as showing that a better mechanism was needed for reviewing unsafe verdicts, and it was a factor in the 1907 creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal for England and Wales. Despite an official inquiry's finding that Edalji was the author of poison pen letters associated with the mutilations, he was allowed to resume practice as a solicitor and lived quietly with a sibling until his death.

Background

Edalji was the eldest of the three children. His mother was Charlotte Edalji (née Stoneham), the daughter of a Shropshire vicar. His father was the Reverend Shapurji Edalji, a convert from a Bombay Parsi family. He had served as the curate in several parishes before being given the living as vicar of St Mark's, Great Wyrley. The right to make this appointment lay with the bishop, and the Reverend Mr. Edalji obtained the position through the previous incumbent, his wife's uncle, who arranged it as a wedding present. Livings were much sought after because they were scarce and conferred valuable emoluments. An aristocratic former army officer named Captain the Honourable G.A. Anson was the Chief Constable of Staffordshire during the case, in a long period of office extending from 1888 to 1929. Anson was markedly hostile in his dealings with the Edaljis, which several writers have suggested was due to their ethnicity.

Anonymous letters of 1888

Anonymous threatening letters were sent to the vicarage in 1888, when George Edalji was twelve and a half, demanding that the vicar order a particular newspaper and threatening to break windows if this was not done. He ignored them. Windows were broken and a threat was made to shoot the vicar; he became alarmed and called in the police. Graffiti was written slandering the Edaljis on the inside and outside walls of the vicarage. Pseudonymous letters were sent to the vicarage maid-of-all-work, 17-year-old Elizabeth Foster, threatening to shoot her when her "Black master" was out. One was found inside the hall with the envelope wet; the letter was written on pages from the exercise books of the Edalji children.

The circumstances made it clear that either Foster or Edalji was responsible. Foster was implicated by assertions made by Edalji; the vicar, his wife, and police Sergeant Upton thought that they perceived similarities between Foster's handwriting and that of the pseudonymous threatening letters.

Letters and malicious mischief of 1892

In 1892, a member of the parish council named W.H. Brookes received obscene letters that included accounts of his adult daughter sexually abusing her 10-year-old sister. The letters mentioned Edalji among others at first, but increasingly concentrated on Edalji and the vicar, sometimes using a phrase ("the blackman") that had occurred in 1888 letters attributed to Elizabeth Foster. One letter was made in two distinctly different handwritings. The letters to Brookes accused his son of writing the 1888 letters to the vicarage which had been attributed to Elizabeth Foster, and of giving them to George Edalji to post. The vicar and a vicarage servant also got letters, in which the vicar was accused of "gross immorality with persons using Vaseline in the same way as did Oscar Wilde". Letters purporting to be from the Reverend Mr Edalji were sent to other vicars.

Brookes and the Reverend Mr Edalji called in the police, and Sergeant Upton again found himself investigating poison pen letters to the vicar. Attempts to get the post office to identify the sender failed as the mailed letters ceased. Notes began appearing at the vicarage (a total of over 70), and various objects were left on the doorstep, including a bag of excrement. Police kept watch and claimed to have established that the key, stolen from Walsall Grammar School (where George Edalji was a student) six miles away, that had appeared on the doorstep had done so in a time frame when only George Edalji had used the entrance. Following this, excrement was smeared on the outside of upstairs windows, and Upton decided that George had been responsible for the letters. A couple of roughs were fined for hitting him while he was on one of his evening walks three miles from his house one night in 1900; the assailants were not from Great Wyrley or known to Edalji.

1903 letters and animal maiming

In January 1903, when Edalji was 27 years old, a series of slashings occurred against horses and other livestock, known as the 'Great Wyrley Outrages'. A horse was maimed on 1 February 1903, two horses were similarly wounded on 29 June 1903, and a number of other animals received injuries resulting in their being put down. A letter was also sent to Edalji purporting to be from one of them, 15-year-old Wilfred Greatorex.

Investigation

The Staffordshire Chief Constable, Captain Anson, was an administrator without experience of investigatory police work. He believed that Edalji was the author of the letters, but someone of his professional status could have had no involvement in the animal maimings.</blockquote>

Edalji's defence did not hire experts to testify about his poor eyesight, nor did Edalji himself mention it at trial, only subsequently was it to be the main grounds for his campaign to be recognised as innocent. He later said that he had been told by his lawyers that the prosecution case was so weak it was unnecessary to bring up how poor his vision was, but he also admitted that he could move about at night quite well as long as the road was a main one and familiar to him.

Senior civil servants at the Home Office reviewed the case and reported that there were no serious flaws in the trial and conviction of Edalji. He was paroled after serving three years. The police handwriting consultant said that the letter was by Edalji in his ‘Greatorex’ hand. Police believed that such letters had ceased while Edalji was in prison, and they attributed those pseudonymous or anonymous letters about the case received when Edalji was in gaol to persons other than the author of the 1903 pseudonymous ‘Greatorex’ letters, which police believed was Edalji. Poison pen letters in the name of the “Wyrley Gang” continued until the 1930s, by an offender who also wrote to people connected to other crimes in the news.

Campaign

Doyle became an active investigator, going to the crime scenes, interviewing participants, and critiquing the reliability of the witness who testified that peculiarities found in the handwriting of Edalji also occurred in the 1903 pseudonymous 'Greatorex' letters to police, which named Edalji as a culprit in the animal mutilations. Legal technicalities made the evidence controversial concerning the letters being used to convict Edalji, because he was not tried on the charge of sending a threatening letter. Opinion within the Home Office was split on the matter. Doyle thought that he had identified the person as a certain Royden Sharp who was behind the pseudonymous letters of 1892 and 1903 and the maimings. There have been a variety of opinions since about whether he was justified in his belief, although Peter Costello wrote a modern book on Doyle's investigations and concurred with his conclusion. According to Anson's communications with the Home Office about the case, an assertion was "indisputably false" that Edalji made in a letter published in a newspaper to the effect that he was not abroad after nightfall.

In 2013 Solicitor-General Oliver Heald said that the trial of Edalji had been a farce.

An episode of the 1972 BBC anthology TV series The Edwardians about Conan Doyle centres on his involvement in the Edalji case. It was written by Jeremy Paul, directed by Brian Farnham, and stars Nigel Davenport as Doyle, Sam Dastor as George Edalji, and Renu Setna as the Reverend Edalji.

A BBC radio drama, Conan Doyle Investigates, part of the Saturday Night Theatre series, was aired in May 1972. The script was written by Roger Woddis and the play produced by Anthony Cornish. Doyle was played by Carleton Hobbs, Alfred Wood by Graham Armitage and George Edalji by Brian Hewlett.

Conan Doyle's Strangest Case, a radio play by Tony Mulholland was first broadcast on BBC Radio in 1995, starring Peter Jeffrey as Doyle, Frances Jeater as Kathleen Moriarty and Kim Wall as George Edalji. It was produced by Rosemary Watts.

Julian Barnes's 2005 novel Arthur & George is based on the events, and was the basis for the March 2015 ITV three-part dramatisation of the case Arthur & George, starring Martin Clunes as Doyle and Arsher Ali as Edalji.