Murder on the Verandah: Love and Betrayal in British Malaya

Instead of socializing, Steward seems to have immersed himself in his work. He was respected both as a mining engineer and as someone who did not call attention to himself. This makes his death especially ironic. A person who avoided the public gaze, he would have found the attention hugely embarrassing.

Salak South, the mine he ran until late 1910, prospered under his management. For the month of April that year, the mine produced 122 pikuls of dry ore, an excellent result for a place of its size. (A pikul is the equivalent of 133⅓ pounds.) The machinery – it was Steward’s job to keep it running – worked 594 hours and 35 minutes that month: virtually round the clock.

Kuala Lumpur was a small place then, and Salak South, though just five miles from the Proudlock bungalow, was considered remote. It received few visitors, in part because it was hard to reach and also because it was said to be unlucky. George Cumming, an early backer, invested a fortune in Salak South and lost every penny. People said the place was cursed, and there must have been times when Steward thought so, too. In 1909, production came to a standstill when the Klang river overflowed, flooding the mine and destroying a lot of expensive equipment. Then, just six months before his own death, one of his colleagues died. It happened quite without warning. ‘Mr D. Issacson returned to his bungalow at Salak South about 4 in the afternoon’, the Mail reported, ‘and sat down in a chair from which he never rose, death taking place about 5.30.’ The apparently healthy Issacson had suffered a heart attack. Salak South also claimed the lives of numerous labourers. Equipment was primitive. Methods were rudimentary. The great danger, at this mine as at many others, was cave-ins. They could happen in a moment, burying workers who, all too often, died of asphyxiation before frantic colleagues could dig them out.

When Steward and Proudlock chatted in the Selangor Club in December 1910 – the last time they would talk – the miner was looking for work. ‘The mine has gone phut,’ he said, meaning that the ore had run out. ‘I think I have got another post, but I am not sure yet.’ In January it was confirmed. Steward was now in the employ of F. W. Barker and Co., a firm of consulting engineers based in Singapore. Though he retained his house not far from the mine, Steward now took to the road, trouble-shooting for some of the largest mines and rubber estates in Selangor. It was a relief to be out of Salak South, he said. All that talk of a jinx had begun to prey on him.

Steward was a man who feared complications. He was methodical and thorough, a man who believed in keeping the record straight. Where details were concerned, he was almost fastidious. In October 1910, he wrote to the Mail alerting it to an error it had made: ‘In your issue of 28th inst., you publish the managing director’s report of the Sungei Raia tin mines and mention that the ground ran 15 catties per yard. Surely this is a mistake and probably should read 1.5 catties per yard. I merely point this out in defence of the management there as they might not see your paper. Yours, etc. W. Steward.’ It was a small matter, but none the less revealing, for this was a man to whom small things were important.

Aside from that letter, the Mail mentions him only rarely. Steward did not attend the annual ball to mark the King’s birthday, and he was never a guest at fashionable weddings, regarding such events as frivolous. He played rugby when work permitted – as much for the exercise as for any enjoyment, one suspects – and, once in a while, got in some tennis. In 1909, he entered a tennis tournament the Selangor Club had organized, but was knocked out in the first round. Rugby was another matter. Steward made a fierce opponent. Malaya had numerous rugby teams and, at one time or another, he seems to have played for most of them. His play was unrelenting, shaped, no doubt, by the great football games of Cumberland legend. Hugh Walpole described one in Rogue Herries (1930): ‘The goals were distant nearly half a mile the one from the other. There were few rules, if any; all cunning and trickery were at advantage, but brute force was the greatest power of all. There were fifty players a side to start with, although before the game ended there was nearly a hundred a side … So that now there was a grand and noble sight, this central mass of heaving men, detached groups of fighters, and the spectators shouting, roaring, the dogs barking as though they were mad.’

A picture of Steward shows him standing on a flight of steps leading to a house – his own, perhaps, in Salak South – and looking a little discomfited. Perhaps the camera has unnerved him. A tall, big-framed man, he is bald and wearing a collar and tie. William Steward, it would appear, liked formality. His right hand rests on his right hip – an attitude that in anyone else would suggest nonchalance but which here makes him look awkward. Knowing how shy he was, it is surprising that he posed for a picture at all, unless he intended to send it to his mother. He’d have done anything for her, even if it meant embarrassing himself.

He was serious, even grave, and threw himself into his work. Perhaps he saw it as redemptive. While it is impossible to say why he came to Malaya – whether to advance the country’s interests or his own – he was none the less a caring man, a man who provided for his widowed mother, a man aware of the duty he bore to others.

2

To Hang by the Neck Till She Be Dead

The British in Malaya were still in a state of shock when Mrs Proudlock, still enjoying her freedom, appeared at a magistrate’s inquiry on 1st May. ‘The painful sensation which the [shooting] occasioned from one end of the country to the other has hardly diminished since the discovery of Mr Steward’s body,’ the Mail reported. By then, opinion had begun to change, many taking the view that Ethel was almost certainly guilty. When, looking considerably younger than her twentythree years, this ‘pretty, blonde-haired woman’ took her place at the bar, the room fell silent. One of their own – and female at that – standing in the dock! It proved too much for the magistrate who, his chivalry fired, sent for a chair and told the defendant that she might, if she wished, seat herself near the bench.

He was not the only one in court that day concerned for her comfort. Her lawyer, E. A. S. Wagner, also had her sensitivities in mind when he complained that most of those in the public gallery were Malays and Chinese – what the Mail called ‘the native element’.

‘There are a lot of persons in the court who have no business here,’ Wagner said, ‘and I think this would tend to affect the prisoner.’

As a person who knew the law, Wagner surely would have known that seeing justice done was everyone’s business. Clearly, the presence of non-Europeans made him uncomfortable for another reason: the realization that the trial of Ethel Proudlock had the potential to compromise British prestige. (Wagner was, incidentally, a curious choice to defend Mrs Proudlock. An able lawyer, he and Steward were friends, having often played rugby together. He also seems to have known that his client was guilty. When Somerset Maugham visited Malaya in 1921, it was Wagner who told him of the Proudlock case, even suggesting he write a story about it.)

The police wanted the public excluded, too, but for a different reason. The case involved ‘a certain amount of indecency’, the magistrate was told. The court was being warned that the evidence to be presented was likely to prove embarrassing, not just to Mrs Proudlock, but to the British generally, and the fewer ears it reached the better for all concerned.

Mr Hereford, the lawyer representing the police, opened the proceedings by summarizing ‘the facts in so far as we have been able to ascertain them’. On the night of 23 April, William Steward, he told the court, was dining with two friends in the Empire Hotel when, hearing the clock in the Secretariat building strike nine, he rose suddenly and asked to be excused. He had, he said, an appointment. Then, leaving the hotel in some haste, he flagged down a rickshaw and went directly to the home of the accused.

Besides Mrs Proudlock, the only person in the house when he got there was a cook. Her husband had gone out to dine, and both the ayah (nanny) and the ‘boy’ had the evening off. The cook said he was smoking opium in his room when he heard a man shout, ‘Hey! Hey!’ This was followed by gunshots, but he took little notice until he heard Mrs Proudlock, from somewhere in the garden and sounding much distressed, telling him to fetch her husband.

When Mr Proudlock returned, he found his wife ‘in a very agitated state’ and speaking in ‘a most unintelligible manner’. She told him that Steward had molested her and made improper proposals. There was gunpowder on her right hand, Hereford continued. ‘There is no question that it was she who shot the deceased.’

Hereford then challenged Ethel’s claim that Steward’s visit was unexpected: ‘The deceased stated that he had an appointment. This showed that he must have been aware that he would find the accused in the house by herself… It is difficult to see how he could have known this unless the accused had told him. At some point, there was some communication between them.’

He also challenged her claim that Steward had tried to rape her. When the police found Steward, he was fully dressed, and his trousers – what the Mail called ‘his nether garments’ – were buttoned. ‘The medical evidence did not show any accomplishment of violation.’ Nor was there evidence of a struggle. A teapoy had been overturned but, aside from that, nothing else had been disturbed.

‘This,’ he added ominously, ‘makes her story not very easy to believe.’

Continuing his attack on Mrs Proudlock’s probity, Hereford now turned to the matter of her attire. Though she was dining by herself, the accused wore an evening dress which, he had been told, ‘is cut very low’. According to her husband, Mrs Proudlock always dressed like this in the evenings, even when she dined alone. But Hereford was sceptical. Allowing that this was not beyond the realm of possibility, it was, he said, ‘a question which has to be considered as to whether it does not point to the expectation of a visit from the deceased’.

The evidence had begun to look damning and when the court rose that day, the magistrate, no longer feeling chivalrous, refused to grant an application for bail. For the first time since the shooting, Mrs Proudlock was deprived of her liberty and removed to Pudu gaol, a mile from the courtroom. But old habits die hard. To spare her the indignity of riding to prison in a police van, Detective-Inspector Wyatt drove her there himself in his private car.

It must have been an uncomfortable drive for both of them. What could they possibly have found to say to one another? Wyatt, in charge of the police investigation, could hardly have offered his sympathy. Like many in KL, he did not doubt she was a killer, but there were other obligations on him – obligations of gallantry and the respect due to one’s own. A solidarity existed between them – and would do so until such time as the court found her guilty.

Pudu gaol would be Mrs Proudlock’s home for the next two-and-a-half months. The prison, completed just six years earlier, covered an area of 7 acres and could accommodate as many as 600 prisoners. Separate from the main building was the female wing which comprised six cells, each containing a plank bed and a wooden pillow. When not locked up, women prisoners were allowed to congregate in a common room where they could knit or even do a little sewing. For their refreshment, the prison provided a pail of weak tea.

In September 1909, the Mail had run a long story about Pudu gaol, a story that Mrs Proudlock is almost certain to have read. As well as a daily rice ration, the Mail reported, each prisoner received meat or eggs and two kinds of vegetables. Meals were served twice a day – one at 10.15; the other at 4 – and porridge was provided in the early morning. Meals were taken in two large, open-sided sheds to the right of the prison proper. ‘All is scrupulously clean and neat,’ the story went on. ‘There is not a speck of dirt anywhere … In the cooking area, there is a marked absence of the somewhat unsavory smells which so often hover over Oriental culinary preparations.’

The regime as reported does not sound especially harsh but, that said, Mrs Proudlock cannot have found it very pleasant. Separated from her husband and her young daughter, she was alone, incarcerated, and facing an uncertain future. As she contemplated that plank bed and wooden pillow, one can imagine her terror.

On the stand the next day, William Proudlock told the court that, on 23 April, he and his wife took a nap after lunch, rose at 4, had tea on the verandah and then put in some target practice, using a revolver she had given him just five days earlier as a birthday present. At 5.25, he had handed the gun to Ethel and told her to put it ‘in a safe place’. Both of them then left for church, after which they briefly visited the Selangor Club and went home, where he changed clothes and left for his dinner appointment.

Asked if he and his wife were on good terms, Proudlock said, ‘Oh, yes.’

Had he ever had occasion to complain about her moral conduct?

‘No,’ he said.

What about her conduct in respect to other men: did he ever have cause to complain about that?

‘Never.’

Asked why his wife had given him a gun for his birthday, he said that their home in Brickfields Road – the one now occupied by Goodman Ambler – had been broken into the previous August, and they had talked several times since about buying a revolver.

On the day before the shooting, he said, his wife had run into Steward at the Selangor Club and had been forced to talk to him when, passing his chair, he had looked up at her and said hello. In the course of a short conversation, his wife had remarked on how long it was since Steward had been to see them and mentioned that she and her husband had moved to another house. When Steward asked where, she felt she had no choice but to tell him.

Proudlock said he had known Steward for almost two years and considered him a friend. ‘He’s always behaved as a gentleman towards my wife.’

Summoned home the night Steward died, he found his wife ‘in a state of disorder’. Her face was very white, and she was sobbing violently. ‘I saw at once that there had been a struggle of some description.’ The next day, he saw bruises on her shoulders and on her legs. (The prosecution claimed that these were self-inflicted. A doctor who examined Ethel on Sunday night had found no bruising at all.)

Goodman Ambler, described by Proudlock as ‘a great personal friend’, then took the stand, testifying that after dinner that Sunday evening he and Proudlock chatted and smoked, and then Will had played the piano, only stopping when the cook arrived.

Mrs Proudlock, when Ambler saw her, looked ‘very wild and excited’. Trembling violently, she then became hysterical and almost collapsed. Ambler remembered noticing that her dress was torn below the knee and near the waist. He and Proudlock helped her into the house where Ambler wrapped her in a shawl and her husband gave her a glass of sherry. Lying on a settee, ‘she kept half-rising and looking about her very wildly’. When Ambler tried to soothe her, she became angry and told him to shut up. Proudlock took his wife’s hand and said, ‘Tell us about it, Kiddie.’

As Mrs Proudlock described it, Ambler said, Steward got up when she went to get the book and kissed her saying, ‘You’re a lovely girl. I love you.’

‘She sternly remonstrated with him,’ Ambler continued, ‘and then shouted for the servants.’

Mrs Proudlock told him that after shooting Steward once, she then shot again. Steward ran from the verandah, and she followed. She remembered stumbling on the steps. And then her mind went blank. When she recovered herself, she was back in the house.

Steward, she said, had lifted her dress and ‘tried to spoil me’.

Asked to characterize Mrs Proudlock, Ambler described her as a quiet woman who took pride in her home. ‘She and her husband never quarrelled.’

Tan Ng Tee, the rickshaw puller, said he saw Mrs Proudlock – the ‘mem’ – follow Steward down the steps and stand over his prone body: ‘The man made a noise, “Ah.” Then he was quiet.’

Tan asked Ethel what had happened to Steward. ‘I asked twice,’ he said. ‘I got no answer. I ran away fast. When I neared the gate, I heard shots: pok, pok, pok. I was frightened. I kept on running.’

Near the body, the police discovered prints which later were found to match Mrs Proudlock’s shoes: black pumps with raised heels and two large buckles.

James McEwen, a friend of Steward’s, testified to seeing him in the Selangor Club that Sunday. He also saw the Proudlocks. He described Mrs Proudlock as wearing a black ‘picture’ hat. Asked if he had seen Steward and Mrs Proudlock exchange signals, McEwen said that he had not.

On Day 3 of the proceedings, Will Proudlock asked to take the stand again. He wished, he said, to amend his earlier statement that his wife wore an evening gown when she dined alone. He had meant to say that she wore an evening gown when the two of them – he and she – dined alone. It was a clarification that did nothing to help Ethel’s case; if anything, it reinforced suspicions that she had donned this garment only because she expected company.

In the event it hardly mattered. Dismissing Ethel’s claim that she had acted in self-defence, the magistrate closed the inquiry by reading the charge against her: ‘That on or about April 23, 1911, in Kuala Lumpur in Selangor, you did commit murder by causing the death by shooting of one William Crozier Steward and thereby committed an offence punishable under section 302 of the penal code.’ She was ordered to stand trial at the next assizes.

Mrs Proudlock cried and trembled as the charge was read, and it was some time before she could compose herself. Then, with some difficulty, she struggled from the dock and, her face stained with tears, left the court on her husband’s arm.

Mrs Proudlock would languish in Pudu gaol for almost six weeks before Kuala Lumpur next saw her. On 11 June she appeared in the Supreme Court where her trial opened before Mr Justice Sercombe Smith. Ethel was dressed in white and wore a hat whose veil concealed much of her face. According to the Mail, ‘she looked very pale as she took her place in the dock’. The public gallery was almost empty.

It is a little ironic that Mrs Proudlock, an aspiring thespian, had recently appeared to good reviews in an amateur production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury, but would now enjoy no such privilege herself. Jury trials had been abolished in Malaya some years earlier, in large part because the pool of jurors, being confined to Britons – the only group thought capable of reaching judicious decisions – was necessarily small. Another reason for abolition had to do with a distrust of lawyers, most of whom were considered cynical and tendentious and all too likely to play on jurors’ emotions. Instead of trial by jury, Malaya employed the assessor system – later a source of much controversy. Under this arrangement, the defendant faced a triumvirate comprising a judge and two assistants. The judge interpreted the law, and the assistants, members of the public who in most cases had no legal training at all, assessed the evidence ‘in the cold light of reason’. And then all three voted, verdicts being determined by a simple majority.

During the six weeks since Ethel had last been seen in public, rumours had been circulating that she and Steward were lovers. This was mere conjecture, Sercombe Smith reminded his assessors that first morning. Steward had attended the musical ‘at homes’ Will Proudlock liked to organize and, like many others, sometimes ran into the Proudlocks at the Selangor Club. This in no way proved, he said, that Steward and Mrs Proudlock had been intimately involved.

Mrs Proudlock, Sercombe Smith went on, said she killed Steward in self-defence: ‘I was protecting my person as I am entitled to do.’ But had Steward really tried to rape her? That, too, had still to be proved, and the assessors’ decision in the matter would determine the case’s outcome.

The first to take the stand was the defendant’s husband who told the court that his marriage was a happy one. Ethel ‘was always very attentive and affectionate’. She had been nineteen when he married her in 1907. Her health had been bad, he said, and they left for England within hours of the wedding. On the journey home, she was attended several times by the ship’s doctor. Since her return to KL in November 1908, her health had been poor. ‘She’s always been very nervous and easily frightened.’

G. C. McGregor, one of Ethel’s doctors, then described her medical history in some detail – information which the Mail chose not to publish for reasons of propriety. (The details that follow were taken from a transcript of the trial sent to the Colonial Office.) Ethel had numerous problems, McGregor said: profuse leucorrhoea (an abnormal vaginal discharge), excessive and irregular menstruation, relaxed genitalia, a collapsed uterus and a tender ovary. There was more: the lips of her vulva were malformed, and her vagina contained large quantities of pus. McGregor had urged her to have an operation, but Mrs Proudlock, as he put it, ‘kept putting off the evil day’. Ethel, he finished, was a delicate girl who did not possess the strength of a normal person. When Steward confronted her, she became hysterical and had fired those shots, not to kill him, but to rid herself of an impending calamity.

Dr Edward MacIntyre, an assistant surgeon assigned to KL’s General Hospital and the man who examined Mrs Proudlock on the night of the murder, was asked if her eyes looked dazed. ‘Dazed’ didn’t seem the right word, he said; as he remembered them, they looked intelligent. He did not get the impression that the accused had just experienced a severe mental shock.

JUDGE: It has been stated that the accused struggled her hardest. In your opinion was the condition of the accused compatible with her having struggled her hardest?

MACINTYRE: No.

JUDGE: Compatible with any kind of struggle?

MACINTYRE: Yes.

Inspector Farrant, who searched Steward’s house in Salak South, said he found clothes belonging to a European female and a European child in Steward’s bedroom. It is not known if these belonged to Mrs Proudlock and her young daughter; the prosecution did not pursue the subject. The only letters in the house, Farrant said, were from the dead man’s mother and sister in Whitehaven.

While Farrant was searching the house, the court was told, a Chinese woman, presumably Steward’s lover, asked the policeman if he knew of Steward’s whereabouts. When told that he’d been murdered, she burst into tears. With the exception of members of his family, this woman may have been the only person to weep for Steward, the only person who actually cared about him. In the eyes of Ethel’s dwindling supporters, Steward’s association with a Chinese woman proved beyond all doubt the extent of his degeneracy. A moral man, a man of any character, didn’t do such things. If Steward was capable of sleeping with a Chinese, he was capable of anything. For such a person, raping a white woman was a very small step.

Recalled to the stand, Proudlock had to fight back tears when asked to describe his wife’s demeanour after she had retired that evening: ‘During the night, I saw her muttering something in what I thought was her sleep. I got out of bed. I put on the lights, and she was on her back with her eyes staring up. I said, “What is it, Kiddie?” She made no reply and turned over.’

‘What was the object of her putting on the gown?’ the judge wanted to know. ‘To look beautiful?’

‘No. To be cool.’

There were even fewer people in the public gallery when the case resumed next morning, but after lunch the court was full. The day was unusually hot, and a supporter had provided Mrs Proudlock with a paper fan.