Murder on the Verandah: Love and Betrayal in British Malaya

Mrs Proudlock had become a major embarrassment. Though she had her enemies, few wished to see her die on the gallows, and so it was decided to seek clemency for her. Just hours after the verdict was read, William Proudlock cabled the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London and appealed for a royal pardon in consideration of George V’s approaching coronation.

Others were busy, too. Her lawyers lodged an appeal, claiming that no motive had been established; the prosecution had unfairly painted Mrs Proudlock as a libertine; and it had not been proved that a person suffering a deep mental shock is accountable for her actions.

Also making the rounds were several petitions seeking a reprieve and addressed to the Sultan of Selangor. ‘The European petition has been signed by over 200 persons, and the Indian petition by about 500,’ the Mail reported. ‘A petition is also being prepared for signatures among the leading members of the Chinese community.’

A cablegram was dispatched to Her Majesty the Queen in Buckingham Palace. ‘We undersigned European women in Kuala Lumpur’, it read, ‘implore pardon at this coronation time for Ethel Proudlock, aged 23, wife and mother, sentenced to death for shooting.’ The cost of the cablegram, the Mail reported with some pride, ‘was almost $150’.

In Great Shelford, Cambridgeshire, Will Proudlock’s seventy-two-year-old father weighed in as well, writing to the Foreign Office to seek the help of Sir Edward Grey. In a letter dated 16 June, this former millwright told Grey that he had once worked on his estate and appealed to him to save ‘my poor daughter-in-law from the horrible fate awaiting her’. In poor health now – his sight was failing – Proudlock referred to Steward’s death as ‘this crushing calamity which has come upon me in my old age’. Ethel had not murdered anyone, he said; all she had done was defend herself ‘from being outraged by a brute’. Proudlock told Grey that he had once been a coal miner and had ‘started work in the pit as trap-door keeper at the age of eight years’. The letter ended: ‘I am, Sir, in dire distress, yours obediently, William Proudlock.’

On 26 June, the younger Proudlock received a reply from the Colonial Office informing him that if he sought leniency for his wife, he had best appeal to the Sultan of Selangor: ‘I am directed to inform you that… the exercise of the prerogative of mercy is a matter for the discretion of the local government with which His Majesty the King does not desire to interfere.’

Newspapers in England, making much of what they saw as constitutional anomalies, claimed to be shocked that an ‘Oriental potentate’ would have it in his power to determine Mrs Proudlock’s fate. But since even Lord Northcliffe must have known that this, like all the sultan’s other powers, was circumscribed, the ‘shock’ was largely bogus. Besides, this ‘potentate’ had a good heart. Richard Winstedt, who wrote the first Malay–English dictionary, described him as ‘a mild gentleman of refined manners and instincts’ whose hobbies ‘were religion, cookery and wood-carving’. (According to Winstedt, who was recovering from malaria when Steward died, the nurses looking after him in a Malayan hospital had no sympathy for Ethel. She had disgraced her sex, they said, and, in their estimation, hanging was too good for her. That changed, though, when the verdict was handed down. Then they went around the wards pleading with their patients to press to have her pardoned.)

Also on 26 June, the sultan responded to the petition signed by the European ladies: ‘In reference to your petition praying for a free pardon for Mrs. Proudlock now under sentence of death, I am directed to inform you that an appeal has been entered against the verdict and that the consideration of your petition will be deferred until the result of the appeal is declared or the appeal is abandoned.’

To the shock and dismay of her supporters, her legal advisers among them, Mrs Proudlock now withdrew her appeal and announced that she was placing herself entirely at the sultan’s mercy. In a letter sent to Wagner but clearly intended for public consumption, she said it would be at least a month before the court of appeal took up her case, and she feared that the wait would prove too much for her.

‘The suspense is simply awful,’ she wrote. ‘I am, as you are probably aware, in a condemned cell. Each day and night the only time I am not locked up behind iron bars is when the jailer takes me out for exercise. The continual supervision has got on my nerves to the extent that I feel that another month of it would deprive me of my reason.

‘I have a horror of appearing in court again. My recollections of it are so terrible that I cannot bear the idea of having to go through it all over again. I do not feel that any punishment could cause me more pain and suffering than I have already endured. Conscious of my own innocence of the terrible charge against me, I shrink from being stared at and pointed out as a condemned criminal.

‘I am told that various petitions have been sent to His Highness the Sultan asking that I may be pardoned. I hope that he may be made to take pity on my sufferings.’

Conscious that her decision would disappoint her supporters, she extended her apologies: ‘I hope they will understand. Perhaps if they saw my cell they would say so. I am unfeignedly grateful to them all, and I will ask my husband to convey to the ladies of Penang and other parts my sincerest thanks for their sympathy to one in such terrible trouble as myself.’

Not everyone was mollified. ‘No one could have read the pathetic letter which Mrs. Proudlock addressed to her counsel unmoved,’ the Mail said on 1 July. ‘On the whole, however, we cannot help thinking that it would have been better had the appeal been allowed to proceed.’

The ambivalence was understandable. While her supporters did not wish to see her suffer, an appeal might have resulted in an absolute acquittal. That would now not happen. Even if, as seemed more and more likely, the sultan did grant her a pardon, the verdict of murder would stand, and Ethel would remain a convicted killer. Some saw this as less than satisfactory. They wanted all taint of guilt removed because only when she was exonerated would they be exonerated. As things stood now, there would always be a doubt. Had this woman – to all appearances chaste and modest – killed her lover in a fit of jealous rage? And if she had, what did it say about other apparently modest women?

Events now began to move swiftly. On 1 July, the Mail expressed its pleasure that ‘intimation that the sentence will be commuted’ had been relayed to Mrs Proudlock and that the good lady had been moved from Death Row and was again in ‘one of the ordinary cells of the jail … She will know the extent to which the sentence has been commuted in a couple of days – on Monday, we believe, when the Sultan of Selangor is to sit in council to deal with the matter.’

At Monday’s council meeting, however, Mrs Proudlock was not mentioned. Just why is hard to say – unless there was dissension. While the sultan had made it clear that he favoured a pardon, many British officials, convinced of Ethel’s guilt, pressed instead for a life sentence. They did so for political reasons, arguing that as damaging as the murder had been, setting her free would make a mockery of British claims that, before the law, rulers and ruled alike were treated equally. Five days of intense negotiation followed after which the council met again in Klang, on Saturday, 8 July. Those present included J. O. Anthonisz, the acting British Resident, and Sercombe Smith, who brought along the notes he had taken at the trial.

Sercombe Smith told the council that Ethel’s conduct ‘points rather to revenge than to human frailty. Her firing was, in my opinion, deliberate and unjustifiable.’ The court, he said, had ‘utterly disbelieved her evidence’. Granting her a pardon would be a mistake.

The council’s British members agreed, but the sultan stood firm, and Anthonisz chose to let him have his way. ‘I have little doubt’, Anthonisz said later, ‘that if the native element had been eliminated and the sultan had not expressed such a strong wish, the result would have been a commutation of the sentence to a term of imprisonment.’

Anthonisz was much criticized for this decision. People said he was weak and, in a matter as grave as this, should have stood his ground. Anthonisz was not much liked. Though educated at Cambridge, he was Ceylonese which, in raceconscious KL, did little to win him friends. But in this case, at least, the charge of weakness was unfair. Anthonisz was one of just a few British officials who considered Ethel innocent. Her evidence sounded rehearsed, he said, ‘but I am not prepared to go so far as to say that it was not piled up on a foundation of truth … I think it was not unlikely that the motive alleged was the correct one.’

In some quarters, the pardon provoked an uproar. ‘There is nothing to support the theory of attempted rape and a good deal that tells against it,’ one official said. Sercombe Smith was especially critical and accused the sultan of acting despotically. His action amounted to a slur, he said, which no self-respecting judge should have to endure.

The pardon had come with a condition. In return for being released from prison, Mrs Proudlock would have to leave the country. Though she had no choice in the matter, she was probably glad to go. She must have understood that Malaya had washed its hands of her. It was not a kind place. If she had stayed, her life would have been a hell.

News of the pardon reached KL at three o’clock that Saturday afternoon and, two hours later, Anthonisz signed the papers authorizing Mrs Proudlock’s release. At nine that evening, the Mail reported, she ‘was free and was being embraced outside the gate of Pudu Jail by her husband. Her father and mother … were also there to welcome her. Mrs. Proudlock was not attired in prison clothes, she having changed into clothes which her mother had forwarded … Nobody save her relatives were present at her release. She was in a highly nervous condition and, to avoid the possibility of a breakdown, she was advised to retire at once on her arrival at her destination.’

The day after her release, Mrs Proudlock did something rather unusual for a woman of her supposedly reclusive nature: she agreed to be interviewed by the Malay Mail. As described by the paper’s reporter, she was very pale and had lost a lot of weight but, that aside, he said, she looked ‘considerably brighter and more cheerful than at any period during her appearance in court’. Mrs Proudlock, ever conscious of the figure she cut, had dressed for the occasion in a cream-coloured suit.

Ethel told the Mail that she would soon be leaving for Penang where, after a short rest, she planned to sail for England. Though she had been given just four days in which to wind up her affairs, she made no mention of being under any pressure. She was going to London, she said, because she needed a complete change if she was ever to regain her health.

‘It may not be generally known that as soon as the death sentence was passed on me I was placed in the condemned cell. I was placed on a prison diet and ordered to wear prison clothes … I was allowed permission to see particular friends, but was not able to speak to them through the iron bars of my cell. How I must have looked I cannot say.’

Her mental health became so precarious, she said, there were fears she might do herself a violence: ‘I was watched day and night … I was even denied the use of a knife with which to cut food.’

She continued to protest her innocence: ‘In spite of the fate hanging over me, I felt myself justified absolutely in the act I had committed. The horrors of my imprisonment were intensified because I had not the knowledge that I was suffering for my sin.’

Though her gaolers had shown her every consideration, she described her time in prison as ‘truly wretched. I can only say I have the deepest feeling of gratitude towards all those of every race’ who extended their sympathy.

In Penang, the Mail reported a few days later, Mrs Proudlock stayed with friends. Though who they might have been is hard to say. Ethel, at this point, cannot have had many friends. People had begun to understand the problems she had caused. She had become a pariah, and the morning she left KL, there was no crowd of well-wishers at the railway station to see her off; no farewell toasts; no tears; no promises to stay in touch. Wishing perhaps to deter the curious, the authorities had taken the precaution of keeping her plans a secret.

There were no well-wishers, either, in Penang a week later when Mrs Proudlock, accompanied by Dorothy, her daughter, stood on Swettenham Pier, waiting to board the Hidachi Mars, a ship bound for Tilbury and flying the Japanese flag. Malaya heaved a sign of relief when the ship weighed anchor. It had rid itself, or so it thought, of a major headache.

Five days later, Mrs Proudlock reached Colombo where ‘she was met on board by friends and went ashore with her child’. On 22 August, and looking ‘somewhat thin’, she reached England, then experiencing that rare phenomenon, a drought. When asked by a reporter to discuss her trial and incarceration, she declined. Nothing could compel to her to talk about it, she said; it was something she wished to forget. She did say, though, that she had returned to England in order to recuperate and that, while there, she would be staying with relatives. ‘I hope that Mr. Proudlock will be able to join me here in a few months’ time. But at present we cannot be sure of that.’

Had she plans to return to Malaya at some point? Mrs Proudlock really couldn’t say. For the time being, she said, her only plan was to get some rest.

4

A Man on a Mission

There was no rest, however, for William Proudlock. Back in KL, his problems had begun to compound. Throughout that summer he soldiered on, running VI, drinking at the club occasionally, turning up at St Mary’s – to see him, people said, one would think nothing had happened: that there had never been a murder; that Ethel had gone to England on holiday; that William Steward had never existed.

Proudlock was unlikely to have been that self-deluding. And even if he were, it could not have been for long because on 10 October, Bennett Shaw, VI’s headmaster, returned from leave. Intending, perhaps, to tell him of Steward’s death, Proudlock had gone to the station to meet him, but Shaw, it turned out, was aware of the murder, having read of it in the British papers (the London press dubbed it ‘the murder on the verandah’). Doubtless he was appalled – not only because he liked the Proudlocks, but because of the opportunity it gave England’s moralists to revive a familiar charge: without Mrs Grundy to keep an eye on them, the British abroad lived lives of depravity and dissolution.

Ten days later, the school marked Shaw’s return by honouring him with a concert. The Mail, lavish with its praise as usual, declared the event a huge success. The paper particularly enjoyed a suite of English folk songs with piano accompaniment. Only in passing is it mentioned that the pianist was William Proudlock. Poor man. He can only have played with heavy heart. In the week and half since Shaw’s return, the headmaster and he had had a chat during which Shaw explained that his presence at the school had become an embarrassment. Playing ‘Greensleeves’ that night, Proudlock knew his days were numbered. On 24 October, VI made it official; Proudlock had resigned his post, it was announced, and would be returning to England in the very near future.

Before he went anywhere, however, he had to endure yet another ordeal: a charge of libel brought against him by his former friend, Detective-Inspector Wyatt. The action had its origins in a letter Proudlock wrote to a London weekly called M.A.P. (Mostly About People), in which he castigated the Selangor government for what he said was the highly irregular manner in which his wife’s trial had been conducted.

Though Proudlock’s writing style is brisk and forthright, the letter clearly was composed in haste. Several words are misspelled, the Bible is misquoted, and his signature – hurried and careless; hardly more than a scrawl – looks as if it were penned by a child. (In the excerpts that follow, the spelling has been corrected.) Proudlock begins with an explanation. He was writing to the magazine, he said, to call ‘the attention of the British public to the state of things in [Malaya] which I feel sure every rightminded Britisher will heartily condemn. The press out here has apparently been unable to induce the authorities to abandon trial by assessors in favour of trial by jury and so, off my own bat, I am going to see what I can do in the way of moving the authorities at Home.’ He was not optimistic, he said. The London government knew little of the state of things in the FMS, so little that ‘one feels inclined to say with Elijah “Either they are talking or peradventure they sleep and must be awaked.”’ (The quotation, from the first book of Kings, chapter 18, verse 27, reads: ‘And it came to pass at noon, that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awaked.’)

Proudlock claimed that two men refused to sign the petition praying for a pardon for his wife, one giving as his reason that all women are unchaste, the other that all women are liars. ‘These men might have been assessors,’ he wrote. ‘In Scotland (recently), it was necessary to employ a jury in a case about a pearl necklace, but out here in a case where the life of a human being is at stake, we can manage with two assessors who are allowed to mix with their fellow men while the trial is proceeding.’

Then, ‘for the benefit of any poor devil who may be called upon to suffer the awful agony of mind my poor young wife went through’, Proudlock lists a number of irregularities any one of which today would almost certainly result in a mistrial.

1. The assessors were not only friends, they were business associates which meant, he said, that, for all practical purposes, there was only one assessor at the trial.

2. During the six-day hearing, the assessors, instead of being sequestered, mixed freely, not only with members of the public, but with police officers and lawyers, and witnesses for the prosecution. This, Proudlock said, was highly improper and raised questions about their objectivity. (The chief secretary of the FMS would later defend the assessors. Their behaviour ‘had the appearance of wrong,’ he said, ‘but I cannot think they were discussing the case. I have no hesitation in describing both of them as imbued with a high sense of honour.’)

3. While his wife was being tried for murder, the chief commissioner of police had approached a man in the Selangor Club and had offered to bet him ‘five, ten or anything he liked that she (Mrs Proudlock) would be strung up’. (The chief commissioner would later receive a reprimand, the government arguing that demoting him would ‘only add to the further public washing of excessively soiled linen’.)

Proudlock claimed as well – and this was the charge that Wyatt said questioned his integrity and resulted in his suing for gross and malicious libel – that the detective-inspector had beaten Proudlock’s servants because they refused to incriminate his wife.

‘I feel sure’, Proudlock finished, ‘that all who read this will agree that things out here are far too slack and that no person – white, black or yellow – be tried by less than twelve sound men even if they have to be imported from England.’

At 10.30 a.m. on 31 October, the trial began with H. N. Ferrers, Wyatt’s counsel, describing Steward’s murder as ‘the most painful episode in the annals of crime in this country’. It was also, he said significantly, a case that everyone hoped had been closed. To the charge of libel, Ferrers now seemed to be adding another: with these frivolous accusations, William Proudlock was opening old wounds and prolonging Malaya’s agony.

Ferrers then proceeded to paint the defendant as a radical – something he clearly was not. When Proudlock wrote to M.A.P., he said, he was a man on a mission, a man whose purpose was ‘to reform the very state of things as they existed in KL’. Proudlock was not present to hear himself characterized like this. For thirty minutes, the trial had proceeded without him – in itself irregular, one would have thought. All apologies, he arrived in court half an hour late.

Ferrers said Wyatt denied ever having assaulted the defendant’s cook and ‘boy’. The charge was not just without foundation; it was unfair. The detective was a friend of Mrs Proudlock’s and had demonstrated as much by waiting seven days before imprisoning her and then going ‘to considerable pains to assure her comparative comfort’.

According to Proudlock, Ferrers said, the ‘boy’ was asked if he had seen his master practising with the revolver on the day of the murder, and when he said he had not – that he’d only heard the shots – Wyatt is alleged to have struck him six times in the face.

Ferrers said the charge against Wyatt was intended as a preemptive strike. Mrs Proudlock’s lawyers knew there had been intimacy and improper communication between her and Steward, and that were the matter to be pursued, her servants were likely to incriminate her. That’s why the charge of beating had been concocted – to deprive any fresh evidence of its value by suggesting it had been coerced.

Mrs Proudlock had abandoned her appeal, Ferrers suggested, not as she had said because the strain would prove too much for her, but because she and her lawyers knew that the evidence against her was overwhelming and that ‘the only chance of getting the lady off was by means of appealing to public sentiment’. This was done by representing her ‘as a poor, persecuted, young and modest woman’.

On the witness stand, Proudlock claimed that Wyatt had asked his ‘boy’ if he had ever carried notes between Ethel and Steward, and that Wyatt became angry when the boy said he hadn’t.

Proudlock also testified that Wyatt, asked by E. A. S. Wagner, Ethel’s lawyer, if he had struck the servants, admitted that he had, saying: ‘I had to straighten them up a bit. Cookie, the old fool, couldn’t tell whether the lights were on or not.’

Wyatt then seemed to regret his candour, telling Wagner that were he ever to repeat this, the detective would bring a dozen witnesses to testify that he had not touched either of them. ‘Do you think I am such a fool as to put my neck in a noose for a damn China man?’

Proudlock told the court that he’d written to M.A.P. because he had a duty to his wife. ‘I believe that many things out here are slack, and I wanted to bring the things I knew about to the notice of the British public.’

Cross-examined by Ferrers, Proudlock denied being married when he and Ethel were wed in 1907. He had arrived in Malaya in 1901, he said, and for a time afterwards had lived with a Chinese woman – the mother of one of his pupils. Asked if he had continued seeing this woman after marrying Ethel, he admitted that he had.

While living with him, he said, the Chinese woman had had some jewellery stolen. He estimated its value at $1,500.

FERRERS: Wasn’t it speculated that you had stolen it?

PROUDLOCK: That speculation was false.

FERRERS: After the jewellery was lost, weren’t diamonds seen in your possession?

PROUDLOCK: Yes, but they were not part of the jewellery stolen.

Proudlock said the story that he was the thief had been put about by a European who later sent him a letter in which he withdrew the charge. While VI’s acting headmaster, he had been responsible for large sums of money, and no one – with the exception of the letter-writer – had ever accused him of being dishonest.

Bennett Shaw, who had worked with Proudlock for ten years and may have known him better than anyone, said the defendant had never told him anything but the truth. Proudlock’s reputation for probity was a matter of record, he said; he considered him an honourable and upright man.