ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

LETTERS TO THE PRESS (20)

James Read

[On the evening of Monday, 25th June, 1894, the body of Florence Dennis, aged 23, was discovered in a brook near the village of Prittlewell. She had died from a single bullet wound to the head. Miss Dennis was eight months pregnant and had been staying with her sister, Mrs. Ayriss, in Southend and on her sister’s evidence at the inquest, James Canham Read, a married man who had had a relationship with Miss Dennis, was arrested for the murder. As well as Read’s home in Stepney where he had a wife and several children (accounts varied from four to eight), he also rented another house in Mitcham, under the name Mr. Benson, where he was living with another woman, Miss Kempton, with their young child. In the course of the trial it was revealed that he had also had a relationship with Mrs. Ayriss and was probably the father of one of her children. Read was not a very sympathetic character but maintained throughout the trial that he was innocent of the crime. He was convicted on purely circumstantial evidence and was executed on 4th December, 1894.

Buchanan’s letter was published in The Daily Chronicle and was also copied in full in The Essex County Standard, West Suffolk Gazette and Eastern Counties’ Advertiser and The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post. I feel it should also be noted that Buchanan wrote the letter at the end of November, 1894 - the day before he was due back in the Bankruptcy Court and a little over three weeks since his mother’s death.

The newspapers, both national and provincial, followed the story of James Read avidly, and for the sake of adding some background to the case I have placed the accounts of the trial from The Essex County Standard and Reynolds’s Newspaper below.]

The Pall Mall Gazette (16 November, 1894)

     There rests not a shadow of doubt upon the verdict which the jury found in the Southend murder case. Not one circumstantial link was missing in the chain connecting the crime with the convict Read. The defence was wild and imaginary; its theory was extravagant and unsupported by a single fact of evidence, and its coincidences were too remarkable to influence judge or jury for a moment. Beyond question James Read murdered Florence Dennis in the most horrible circumstances and in the coldest blood. His reasons for the act were obvious, the outcome of an extremely vicious, cruel life. His career was an infamous career of seduction. He added victim to victim without scruple, and, hardened in the end by his own successful villainies, conceived the idea of ridding himself of the woman who had become a burden to him, in order the better to satisfy his evil passion for another. Rarely is so squalid a case discovered in our courts. To be guilty of such infamy a man must lack even the first elements of humanity. When the girl’s condition claimed his remorseful pity and his aid he could think of nothing better than a bloody butchery. If there was ever a criminal worthy of the rope it is James Canham Read.

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The Daily Chronicle (29 November, 1894 - p.5)

THE CASE OF JAMES CANHAM READ.

THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY CHRONICLE.

     SIR,—I have waited silently from day to day in the hope that some more authoritative voice than mine might be raised in protest against the judicial murder which will take place, unless the royal prerogative is exercised, on Tuesday next. To my surprise and sorrow, the leading newspapers are still silent concerning the sentence of death pronounced on James Canham Read, the reputed murderer of Florence Dennis. I say the “reputed” murder, because in my opinion, and in that of many thinking men, the Crown failed utterly to establish its case against the prisoner. Every one who has followed the case for himself, or who has read the admirable letter of “An ex-Chief of Police” in a contemporary, must admit that the chain of so-called circumstantial evidence was imperfect in many of its links. If the life of a human being is to be taken on such evidence as that, no English citizen is safe, and the hideous and barbaric system of judicial murder, which is already the despair of those who work for human civilisation, will have secured for itself another victim whose guilt has not been proved.
     In such a case as the present, in every case which involves the exaction of the extreme penalty, it is infinitely better that a guilty man should escape scot-free than that an innocent man should die upon the gallows. I am quite aware that the popular feeling, at least in London, runs strongly against Read, on the score that he is a man of immoral life; but until we execute men for being immoral (as in God’s good time we may yet do if English Calvinism obtrudes on legislation at its present rate) it is well to reflect that a man of immoral life is not of necessity a murderer, or a man capable of murder. Much of the animus against the condemned man, however, is based upon the assumption that he betrayed and deserted Florence Dennis, even if he did not take her life; yet beyond the statements of the perjured witness, Mrs. Ayriss, there is no proof whatever that he was in the company of the murdered girl on one solitary occasion during the eighteen months which followed their first acquaintance and ended with her death. The Crown was utterly unable to prove a single meeting during that period, and in the solitary written communication between them Florence Dennis addressed her supposed lover as “Dear sir,” surely a not very probable kind of address from a seduced girl to her betrayer.
     At a first glance, Read’s own failure to account for his time on the day of the murder seems to furnish a certain negative proof against him. It is urged on his behalf that he cannot and will not do so because the so doing would involve the honour, perhaps the life, of another woman. Would a man like Read, it is asked with derision, be so chivalric? But here, again, those who clamour for Read’s life are arguing in a circle, for their chief argument to prove that Read is phenomenally immoral is based upon the assumption that he seduced Florence Dennis, an assumption if which, as I have pointed out, there is no legal proof whatever. Here, as everywhere, the Crown failed to prove his guilt.
     It is fortunate perhaps for humanity that we possess now, at the head of the Home Office, a Minister who, unlike his immediate predecessor, is not afraid to temper justice with mercy, and who is not likely to be carried away by the fevered and prejudiced clamour of ultra-Puritans who cry for blood. If James Canham Read is executed on Tuesday next, he will have been sacrificed to the Mænads of English morality, not to the stern spirit of Justice which cries “a life for a life.” I repeat again, and I refer to the whole case again for my corroboration, that this man’s guilt has not been proved.—I am, &c.,

                                                                                                                         ROBERT BUCHANAN.
     Nov. 28.

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The Westminster Gazette (29 November, 1894 - p.2)

     Mr. Robert Buchanan has taken up Read. Mr. Buchanan’s argument appears to be this. Read was, or is supposed to have been “immoral.” Therefore, the Prudes, Puritans, and all those other terrible People beginning with P would like to hang him even if he is innocent. Therefore Mr. Robert Buchanan and everybody else ought to try to get him off even if he is guilty. True, Mr. Buchanan repeats the phrase that Read has not been “proved” to be guilty. But according to the forms of English law, he has been proved. The point which Mr. Buchanan labours, so far as there is anything in it, was especially emphasised by the judge in summing up, almost to the length of suggesting that a sensual man is less likely to commit a murder than one of less fleshly fibre—which, indeed, is quite arguable in the abstract. yet when the jury brought in their verdict of “Guilty,” the judge added that it was the only one possible to those who had heard the evidence.

p.5

MR. BUCHANAN AND J. C. READ

     Mr. Robert Buchanan pens an appeal on behalf of J. C. Read in to-day’s Chronicle:—“I repeat again, and I refer to the whole case again for my corroboration, that this man’s guilt has not been proved.”
     Mrs. Read, wife of the convict, and Mrs. Kelly, his sister, had an interview with Read in gaol yesterday afternoon. Both women saw the convict at the same time, and the meeting lasted a little over half an hour. “My husband seemed in excellent health and spirits,” said Mrs. Read afterwards, “and he is very hopeful about the result of his appeal to the Home Secretary. He asked after all the children, and seemed very glad to see us.”

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The Daily Chronicle (30 November, 1894 - p.5)

THE CASE OF JAMES CANHAM READ.

THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY CHRONICLE.

     SIR,—I am strongly against capital punishment in any and every case; but if I we re not so, I should desire to put in a word in favour of a remission of the death sentence on James Canham Read. I shall not be suspected by any who know what my life work has been of too great a leniency towards immoral men, but if I am a zealous adherent of the cause of social purity, I am still more so of the eternal principles of justice. There is a grave danger in these days of losing sight of the great principles which were handed down to us by our ancestors of respect for individual rights, for liberty, and for justice. Social purity workers will injure the cause to which they are attached if, in their ardour in putting down public immorality, and attacking the outward expression of the cynicism which infects so many minds, they swerve in the least degree from strict justice. Evidence concerning a capital crime should be judged apart from the private life of the person accused.
     I was deeply impressed with these thoughts during the trial of Mrs. Maybrick. The judge on that occasion was one who had a great horror of levity in women, and it was clear to my mind that his summing up against Mrs. Maybrick was very largely coloured by his horror of her alleged infidelity to her husband (who had previously been unfaithful to her); that passionate summing up of the judge carried the jury away, and Mrs. Maybrick was pronounced to be a murderess.
     In this case it is a man who has deceived women, and made them his victims. None the less, as a woman feeling keenly the cruelty of such a man’s acts towards my fellow women, I must add my humble protest against the carrying out of the sentence of death pronounced on him. The evidence in his case seems to me not to justify his execution. The smallest doubt should be held to be enough to alter the sentence.—Yours, &c.,

                                                                                                   JOSEPHINE E. BUTLER.

     Nov. 29.

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THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY CHRONICLE.

     SIR,—If your correspondent Mr. Robert Buchanan be the well-known playwright of that name, I can only say that, judging from huis letter on the case of James Canham Read appearing in your issue of to-day, a man may be a good playwright but an indifferent logician.
     I have no comment to make on the opening paragraph of that letter beyond remarking that its style does not seem quite fitted to form the prelude of a serious argument addressed to a calm and intelligent public; but as to the rest of the letter I will, Mr. Editor, with your permission, refer to it in more detail. First, Mr. Buchanan tells us that beyond the statement of Mrs. Ayriss there is no proof that Read was in the company of Florence Dennis on any occasion during the eighteen months which followed their first acquaintance and ended with her death. I do not know what Mr. Buchanan calls proof; but, apart from the evidence of Mrs. Ayriss, and apart from the fact that Read could not, or would not, give any explanation of his whereabouts at the time of the murder, there was ample evidence before the jury to warrant them in forming the opinion they did as to his whereabouts (vide the evidence of Mrs. Kirby, and of Messrs. Douthwaite, Goulding, and Daniel); there was also strong evidence that he was corresponding with her as late as June 18.
     Next, Mr. Buchanan would have it that “Dear sir” is not the way a girl who had been seduced would address her seducer. In my opinion it is the very way in which a girl would address a seducer who needed to be forced into making some provision for her.
     But perhaps the most curious line of argument is that adopted in the third paragraph of Mr. Buchanan’s letter, in which Mr. Buchanan tries to prove that Read is not phenomenally immoral by setting up a defence which shows that he is ignoring, as he does, the fact that Read, a married man with children, has admittedly seduced two women (Florence Dennis being put out of the question), and was living with one of them when arrested.
     Surely, Mr. Editor, this is an age of common sense, not of maudlin sentiment, as Mr. Robert Buchanan would seem to think.—I am, &c.,

                                                                                                             ARTHUR G. FORD.
     Nov. 29.

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THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY CHRONICLE.

     SIR,—No abler pen than Mr. Buchanan’s could be raised in defence of the convict Read, and believing, as I do, that capital punishment is always “judicial murder,” and in every case a vindictive proceeding, I can only wish that Mr. Buchanan’s plea may be successful.
     There is, however, a complaint against an expression in Mr. Buchanan’s letter that many, with me, must feel ought to be voiced, and I accordingly plead for a place in your columns in order to do so. Like many another man of strong opinions, Mr. Buchanan has his “King Charles’s head,” which we must perforce display in almost every controversy/ This time his bête noire is labelled “English Calvinism,” and a plea for justice for a condemned man is made the occasion for a sneer at the efforts made for the creation of a healthy public opinion, which, had it been established, would have prevented the need for Mr. Buchanan’s plea at all. Surely Mr. Buchanan cannot think it other than just that there should exist an animus against such a man as Read? It is nothing for the purity of society, it is nothing for the growth of charity that such a self-confessed villain should have other than the animus of all who love honesty and truth against his abominable vices; and if Mr. Buchanan cares to describe the feeling this fostered as the product of Calvinism, he may be reminded that it is proclaimed by men who yield no sort of allegiance to that stern sectary, and who think their doctrine derived from a greater than he; a doctrine which, whilst it asserts the need for the unsparing condemnation of such vicious men as the convict Read, has a higher doctrine proclaiming the futility of the rules of a “life for a life” and a “tooth for a tooth” as the basis of reform.—I am, &c.,

                                                                                                                   HERBERT HILL.
     East Finchley, Nov. 29.

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THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY CHRONICLE.

     SIR,—We are asked to admire J. C. Read’s chivalry in concealing the name of the place and the person with whom he spent that fatal night, as some unknown woman’s honour, perhaps life, is at stake, and to believe he is not guilty of Florence Dennis’s death because no one saw them together. Is it any more astonishing that no one saw them together than the fact that this woman is presumably able to conceal his visit or visits to her, or that he should have carried on an intrigue with Mrs. Ayriss, unknown so long? No one knew of the liaison. Had Mrs. Ayriss held her tongue, nothing but the fact of acquaintanceship could be proved.
     Where was Read’s chivalry when he instructed Mr. Warburton who compelled the wretched woman to proclaim, to her shame, the relations that had existed between them? Was it not to prove animus, in the hope of saving himself, he had it proclaimed? And can we believe that such a man would lie in prison four months and risk his neck for a point of honour, for any woman’s sake? If he were able, I contend he would have said at once where he was. Even had it been at Southend and with any woman save Florrie Dennis, it would not be difficult to prove.
     In the sympathy they are trying to arouse for this man, are they not losing sight of the two lives sacrificed, becoming hysterical over his morals, and trying to show that these affected thinking men and women.
     If he dies on the 4th it will not be as a martyr to chivalry that J. C. Read will be remembered, in spite of Mr. Buchanan’s sorrow,—I am, Sir, yours,

                                                                                                                           T. CHAPEL.
     Upton Manor, Nov. 29.

_____

THE EDITOR OF THE DAILY CHRONICLE.

     SIR,—I quite agree with your well-known correspondent Mr. Buchanan. There may be a conviction, amounting almost to a certainty, that Read was the actual murderer, but without actual proof it will be a national scandal if the extreme sentence of the law is carried out on evidence that is admittedly so insufficient and inconclusive. The prosecution failed to show where Read spent the night previous to the murder, and had he stayed in Southend this should have been a comparatively easy task. Where was he? This was for the prosecution to answer, which they failed altogether to do. The identification was, moreover, unsatisfactory.
     Immorality does not necessarily mean murder, and although popular feeling is very strong against Read because of his flagrantly immoral character, yet I submit that the condemned should have the benefit of a very grave doubt, for the following reasons, viz.:—
     1. Lack of evidence adduced as to his previous relationship with Florence Dennis, and inability to prove where he spent the fateful Saturday and Sunday.
     2. Failure to show recent possession of the revolver, and inability to prove ultimate whereabouts of the weapon.
     3. Unsatisfactory identification and general weakness in the prosecution.
     In conclusion, I sincerely hope that clear discrimination, combined with better judgment, will outweigh the natural feelings of repugnance of the man’s immoral life, and ask for further proofs before running the terrible risk of another case of “justice miscarried.”—Yours, &c.,

                                                                                                               UNCONVINCED.

     Nov. 29.

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The Freeman’s Journal (Dublin) (30 November, 1894 - p.4)

     Mr. Robert Buchanan, alleged poet, appears in the newspapers in two somewhat different capacities. In a characteristic letter to the Daily Chronicle he demands the release of the murderer, James Canham Read, the vilest murderer of modern times, of whose guilt the judge and jury had no shadow of doubt, but whom the cocksure Mr. Buchanan proclaims innocent. In another part of the paper the bankruptcy is announced of Mr. Buchanan—debts £15,000, assets nil. It is estimated that his literary income ran close up to two thousand a year, which makes the bankruptcy the less creditable. One would have fancied that his domestic trouble would have diverted his attention for the time being from the vile murderer Read. But Mr. Buchanan is not like the rest of men. We should be glad to have his creditors’ private opinion on the performance.

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Aberdeen Evening Express (30 November, 1894 - p.2)

     THERE are some people in this world who cannot be cowed by adversity. For several months Mr Robert Buchanan, novelist, poet, and general caretaker of public morals, has been under the protecting and watchful eye of the Bankruptcy Court. He has now obtained a discharge on condition that he sets aside one half of his income after £900 a year, until his creditors receive 7s 6d in the pound. Mr Buchanan’s case is not, perhaps, a very exceptional one. He just lived far beyond his income. He speculated, he even indulged in a bet occasionally; but all these matters are quite ordinary accompaniments of bankruptcy. But what singles out Mr Buchanan is the impudent assurance with which he lectures the British public on their lack of morality. If anyone scratches Mr Buchanan he is on his high-horse at once; and if he takes up the cause of a criminal, then everyone who differs from him is at once declared to be utterly destitute of any capacity to understand wrong from right. It will be remembered that over the Maybrick case Mr Buchanan became quite hysterical, abusing judge and jury and a lethargic public in the choicest of Buchananese. Now he has got the Southend murderer on hand. Mr Buchanan, of course, holds that the jury were altogether wrong in returning a verdict of guilty. James Canham Read is, in the eyes of Mr Buchanan, a much injured man. The crime has not been brought home to him, and he declares that if Read is executed “he will have been sacrificed to the Mænads of English morality, not to the stern spirit of Justice which cried ‘a life for a life.’” Hysterical rot of this kind can be repeated too often, and Mr Buchanan is one who has exhausted everybody’s forbearance with his emotional humbug. It is high time that some of Mr Buchanan’s personal friends, if he has any, should undertake the responsibility of telling him that when the British public are desirous of being instructed on questions of morality they will seek a safer guide than Robert Buchanan, poet and novelist.

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The Essex County Standard (1 December, 1894 - p.3)

MR. ROBERT BUCHANAN INTERCEDES
FOR THE CONVICT.

“ANOTHER VICTIM WHOSE GUILT HAS NOT
BEEN PROVED.”

     Mr. Robert Buchanan, the well known poet and writer, has addressed the following letter to the Press, dated Nov. 28:—I have waited silently from day to day in the hope that some more authoritative voice than mine might be raised in protest against the judicial murder which will take place, unless the royal prerogative is exercised, on Tuesday next. To my surprise and sorrow, the leading newspapers are still silent concerning the sentence of death pronounced on James Canham Read, the reputed murderer of Florence Dennis. I say the “reputed” murderer, because in my opinion, and in that of many thinking men, the Crown failed utterly to establish its case against the prisoner. Every one who has followed the case for himself, or who has read the admirable letter of “An ex-Chief of Police” in a contemporary, must admit that the chain of so-called circumstantial evidence was imperfect in many of its links. If the life of a human being is to be taken on such evidence as that, no English citizen is safe, and the hideous and barbaric system of judicial murder, which is already the despair of those who work for human civilization, will have secured for itself another victim whose guilt has not been proved.

IMMORALITY NOT A CAPITAL OFFENCE.

     In such a case as the present, in every case which involves the exaction of the extreme penalty, it is infinitely better that a guilty man should escape scot-free than that an innocent man should die upon the gallows. I am quite aware that the popular feeling, at least in London, runs strongly against Read, on the score that he is a man of immoral life; but until we execute men for being immoral (as in God’s good time we may yet do if English Calvinism obtrudes on legislation at its present rate) it is well to reflect that a man of immoral life is not of necessity a murderer, or a man capable of murder. Much of the animus against the condemned man, however, is based upon the assumption that he betrayed and deserted Florence Dennis, even if he did not take her life; yet beyond the statements of the perjured witness, Mrs. Ayriss, there is no proof, whatever, that he was in the company of the murdered girl on one solitary occasion during the eighteen months which followed their first acquaintance, and ended in her death. The Crown was utterly unable to prove a single meeting during that period, and in the solitary written communication between them, Florence Dennis addressed her supposed lover as “Dear sir,” surely a not very probable kind of address from a seduced girl to her betrayer.

“ARGUING IN A CIRCLE.”

     At a first glance, Read’s own failure to account for his time on the day of the murder seems to furnish a certain negative proof against him. It is urged on his behalf that he cannot and will not do so because the so doing would involve the honour, perhaps the life, of another woman. Would a man like Read, it is asked with derision, be so chivalric? But here, again, those who clamour for Read’s life are arguing in a circle, for their chief argument to prove that Read is phenomenally immoral is based upon the assumption that he seduced Florence Dennis, an assumption of which, as I have pointed out, there is no legal proof whatever. Here, as everywhere, the Crown failed to prove his guilt.

“ULTRA-PURITANS CRYING FOR BLOOD.”

     It is fortunate perhaps for humanity that we possess now, at the head of the Home Office, a Minister who, unlike his immediate predecessor, is not afraid to temper justice with mercy, and who is not likely to be carried away by the fevered and prejudiced clamour of ultra-Puritans who cry for blood. If James Canham Read is executed on Tuesday next, he will have been sacrificed to the Mænads of English morality, not to the stern spirit of Justice which cries “a life for a life.” I repeat again, and I refer to the whole case again for my corroboration, that this man’s guilt has not been proved.

[The rest of that day’s article on ‘The Southend Murder’ is available here.]

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The Essex Newsman (1 December, 1894 - p.2)

The Sheffield Evening Telegraph and Star (1 December, 1894 - p.2)

AN OLD CRY REVIVED.

     JAMES CANHAM READ lies under sentence of death for the murder of Florence Dennis, and unless the Royal prerogative be exercised the wretched man will bid the world farewell on Tuesday next. If ever man deserved such fate surely that man is Read. His notoriously immoral life does not enter into calculations; only his cowardly and clod-blooded murder of the girl he had betrayed may be considered. Nothing more is required. A murder so dastardly can be expiated but in one manner. Yet the party of sickly sentimentalism is lifting up its voice in protest against the fulfilment of the sentence; even Read has found supporters who are attempting to argue that the charge was not proven. So long as the agitation was confined to the anonymous correspondents of a journal anxious for a cheap catchpenny boom it was unworthy attention, but when a man of the prominence of Mr. Robert Buchanan comes forward to lend his influence, it is time to protest. The point which Mr. Buchanan and his companions urge is that the guilt of Read has not been proven. The evidence was purely circumstantial, and links of the chain were by the acknowledgment of the prosecution missing; yet, on the whole, as complete a case was presented that the jury had no hesitation in returning the verdict with which Mr. Baron Pollock, a judge of the greatest impartiality, signified his acquiescence. The case against Read was strong; what was his answer? Did he give any information as to his movements on the day of the murder? He has hinted that he was many miles away, but of evidence of the fact he produced not a tittle. It is hinted that he was engaged at the time in yet another of his numerous liaisons, and that rather than reveal the facts and injure the good name borne by some dishonest woman he is prepared to suffer. Read’s conduct does not indicate that pure chivalry would carry him thus far, and what woman, however keenly she would feel the world’s reproaches, would allow her own reputation to outweigh the life of her lover? Besides, supposing Read’s story to be true, the woman would not be the only person with whom he came in contact. Read might if he would indicate his hinted whereabouts on the fatal night without implicating any mistress whom he desired to shield. Yet on the subject he takes refuge in silence—not even to his own brother will he mention the name of the town or village where the alleged mistress resides. Yet in spite of the fact that the evidence against Read is so damning, and that Read declines to prove, as he could by a word, the innocence he asserts, the Home Secretary is warned that the execution of the man will be “judicial murder,” and he is petitioned to grant a reprieve. To transform Read’s condemnation to penal servitude for life would be a piece of foolishness of which Mr. Asquith is too clever a man to be guilty. If Read is not deserving of the full penalty he is an innocent man, and ought not to be kept in prison another hour. If he requires punishment in connection with the murder of Florence Dennis only one punishment is possible. If the Home Secretary, after the perusal of the evidence, comes to the opinion that Read is innocent he must throw open the doors of the gaol; if he cannot arrive at that conclusion, he has no ground for interfering with the due course of the law.

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The Yorkshire Herald (1 December, 1894 - p.5)

     TUESDAY is fixed for the execution of James Canham Read. An attempt is being made to secure a reprieve, in which Mr. Robert Buchanan has joined, with his usual vehemence of language. We entirely agree with Mr. Buchanan that a man amy be grossly immoral without being capable of murder. But the suggestion that Read is to be hanged because of his immorality is too absurd. The man had a perfectly fair trial before a judge who has never been accused of incapacity or prejudice; he was defended by a most able member of the Bar; and he had every opportunity of producing evidence that he was not near Southend on the night of the murder. No such evidence was, however, forthcoming, and in the absence of it, there is difficulty in seeing how any reasonable person can doubt the guilt of Read. So long as capital punishment is the law of the land it must be enforced; and there is nothing to justify intervention in the case of the murderer of Florence Dennis.

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The Referee (2 December, 1894 - p.1)

[A comment piece about court reporting and the importance of circumstantial evidence.]

St. James’s Gazette (3 December, 1894 - p.4-5)

     The Home Secretary, as might have been expected, has not found any reason for over-ruling the verdict of the jury in the case of the murderer Read; and the wretched man will be hanged to-morrow. Such pertinacious and indomitable sentimentalists as Mrs. Josephine Butler and Mr. Robert Buchanan will probably indulge in one or two more shrieks over another failure to redeem from the gallows a man whose guilt was only proved by circumstantial evidence to the satisfaction of twelve average British males and a particularly clear-headed and fair-minded judge. But Mrs. Josephine Butler and Mr. Robert Buchanan would not do much harm, were it not that certain newspapers give them publicity. Why the Prison Commissioners or the visiting justices allow such sensational “copy” as a convict’s letters to be obtained and placarded about the streets, we do not know. Sir Edmund Du Cane should see to it. But the evil effect of this criminal sensationalism is certain. The prisoner himself is deluded; the law is blasphemed; the law-abiding are scandalized; and a cheap notoriety is held out to the reckless and the vicious.

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[Two accounts of the execution of James Canham Read which took place on Tuesday, 4th December, 1894.]

The Dover Express (7 December, 1894 - p.6)

OUR LONDON LETTER.

It is understood that we do not necessarily identify
ourselves with all our able Correspondent’s opinions.

. . .

     The Home Secretary came to Downing-street on purpose to go thoroughly into the petitions that had been sent in asking for a reprieve for James Canham Read. The failure of the agitators who took up the case to obtain signatures, or to advance a single fact to support the convicted man’s assertions, and the character of the agitation itself, circumscribed as it was, was tantamount to a strengthening of the verdict. For a long while not a hand was raised for the wretched convict at Chelmsford gaol, but one halfpenny evening paper for several days latterly, diligently boomed the subject, and opened its columns to all and any who had arguments to advance. The fatal thing about the correspondence was that nearly all who demanded a reprieve confessed themselves hostile on principle to capital punishment, or were avowedly “cranks” who had something of interest only to themselves to obtrude. The most powerful letter was written by Robert Buchanan. This agitation also induced wonder as to what has become of that Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, which at one time had real influence. There is confessedly a strong feeling in the country against the capital penalty—witness, for example, the jury who recently recommended to mercy one who had murdered his wife and son, on the plea that he was a man of low type, but it has little organisation. It is a shocking reflection on our civilisation that on the 2nd December there were eight men under sentence of death in this country.

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[More information about the case is available at Murderpedia, including this photo of James Canham Read:

[Note the funny colour - this is because this bit treads into the realm of wild speculation and is solely due to my fondness for American TV crime shows. When looking in the online newspaper archives I accidentally came across another ‘Southend Murder’, which occurred almost exactly a year before the Read case. On Saturday 20th May, 1893, Emma Hunt (aged 38) was found in a brook near the village of Rochford (which lies two and a half miles north of Prittlewell), with her throat cut. The youth who found the body, Alfred Hazell, was later arrested, but the case never came to court, the charges were dropped and the crime remained unsolved.

I found it odd that none of the newspaper accounts of the Read case mentioned this earlier murder and I do think Read’s Q.C. missed a trick by not referring to it in his address to the jury, if only to sow some seeds of doubt in their minds. I’m not suggesting that Read was innocent, or that Jack the Ripper had moved to Southend, I just thought it strange that no one mentioned the similarities with the earlier crime. If your curiosity has been piqued the picture below will take you to a report of the murder from Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper (4 June, 1893).]

Letters to the Press - continued

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