Moat Farm Mystery: The Life and Criminal Career of Samuel Herbert Dougal
320
Moat Farm Mystery: The Life and Criminal Career of Samuel Herbert Dougal
320eBook
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Overview
Samuel Herbert Dougal was intelligent, talented, and the recipient of a military medal. Outwardly, he seemed to embody all that Victorian England valued most. But he was also a career criminal whose appetite for sex and money propelled him through scandal after scandal; through the courts, prisons and asylums; and from woman to vulnerable woman. In 1903, the unexplained disappearance of Dougal's latest inamorata, a wealthy spinster named Miss Holland, began to excite public speculation. A tireless hunt for the missing lady commenced, but, having been arrested on a sample charge of forgery, Dougal simply decided to wait it out. Meanwhile, on the outside, his real wife, Sarah, who had been the beneficiary of Dougal's schemes over the course of a decade, had her own plans to escape official scrutiny. Would Miss Holland's whereabouts be discovered? And who, if anyone, would be held to account for her disappearance?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752489728 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 09/03/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 9 - 12 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Moat Farm Mystery
The Life and Criminal Career of Samuel Herbert Dougal
By M.W. Oldridge
The History Press
Copyright © 2012 M.W. OldridgeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-8972-8
CHAPTER 1
'Guilty or not guilty?'
No answer.
The same question again. More loudly. Urgency in the voice.
'Are you guilty or not guilty?'
The hand was there, silently twitching on the fatal lever ...
* * *
SAMUEL DREDGE DOUGAL, a civil engineer born in Greenwich, and Maria Josephine Thompson, who had been born in County Tipperary, Ireland, were married in Dublin on 15 June 1846. She was still in her teens; he was twenty. His unusual middle name – curiously evocative for a civil engineer, although the railways had, by now, begun to usurp the canals – came from his mother's side. It was probably Samuel Dredge Dougal's youthful enthusiasm for his profession that had first taken him to Ireland, but he may have been an independent spirit anyway; when he married Maria, he was some distance from home, with, it seems, few family members nearby. Samuel appears to have decided, fairly soon after his marriage, that Ireland would be unable to provide the sustenance to nurture his evolving professional ambitions, or even to permit him to meet his new personal responsibilities. The potato famine was reaching a terrible crescendo, and the population was becoming radicalised in their growing desperation. One rebellion, in 1848, broke out in Maria's home town of Ballingarry. By this time, however, Samuel and Maria had left Ireland, and were living in East London, and the burden of the greater distance from home had fallen, in the end, not on him, but on her.
By 1851, they were living fairly prosperously, too – not rich, perhaps, but certainly comfortable – in Alfred Street, in Bow. Three miles removed from the city itself, Bow was a middlingly salubrious suburb situated within easy reach of the commercial buzz of the docks, to the south and south west, and the markets and financial centres to the west. Not all of her émigré compatriots, however, were in Maria's position. Thousands of Irish had fled the famine, and, for many, casual labour at London's docksides, for which there was sometimes great competition, offered their only day-to-day prospect of legitimate employment. Looking up and down the road, Samuel must have been aware that some of his neighbours had clerical jobs; some carried responsibility; some had servants: these were marks of the area's quality. On the horizon, though, the comparative misfortunes of the majority were transparently obvious. Whitechapel, sandwiched between the city and Bow, festered and fumed. It was here, in the dark alleyways and squalid courts, that the social implications of want, hunger, disease, neglect, addiction and unemployment found their expression. Already, there was a suspicion that its occult influence had begun to crawl eastwards. Mile End was next to fall; after that, Bow would be exposed to the unwelcome stink of poverty.
Whitechapel, it seems, became Samuel Herbert Dougal's playground. He had been born, the first son of Samuel and Maria, on 15 May 1847 and, word had it, had already consolidated a carefree, thrill-seeking attitude by the time of his adolescence. He was not unintelligent – when motivated, he could even be scholarly – and his father, apparently at some financial cost to himself, attempted to steer his son into his own field of civil engineering. The details are lost now, but the young Dougal is said to have taken some training – perhaps an apprenticeship – in this discipline. This made him employable, and history recalls that he was a 'remarkable draughtsman' and that he had 'particularly good and clear hand-writing'. But Dougal's early facility with the pen failed to fulfil him. Work was one thing, however competent one was; the company of women, Dougal's main conflicting interest in his late teenage years, was much more exciting. Viewing the matter from beneath the furrowed brow which is the prerogative of fathers, Samuel Dredge Dougal is said to have disapproved of his son's hedonistic behaviour, but his strictures can only have frustrated the errant, headstrong, free-spending young man: at this point, sex and – perhaps – embryonic experiments with alcohol became gestures of defiance, rather than mere hobbies.
The East End's unabashed public temptations provided the catalyst for disharmony at home. Dougal's late adolescence has been described in thrillingly evocative, and even envious, terms: 'vainglorious', 'dissolute', 'extrovert', 'adventurous', 'erring'. In fact, 'superficial' and 'pretentious' might fit equally well. He may have fraudulently adopted the habit of speaking with his mother's Irish accent, finding that women enjoyed the music of the language. He may have been encouraged by his early successes with the opposite sex, each separate triumph bolstering his confidence, and he may have been selfish and, for his time, sexually uninhibited. Extrovert and adventurous all this may have been; examined another way, Dougal's licentious predilections, and his glib immunity to his parents' remonstrations, simply laid the foundations for what was to come.
* * *
But much of this is really hearsay, and the first glimpse we catch of the man, beyond the peradventure of his early years, finds him in the flush of his early adulthood: in the middle of March 1866, Samuel Herbert Dougal, R.E., 8739, stood on the Kentish coast at Chatham. He had committed to the Royal Engineers for the usual term of service – twelve years. The army was not so long out of the chaos of the Crimea, and, although the public enquiry into the failures of the campaign had sometimes highlighted the lack of intellectual potential in the average British soldier, new recruits were always necessary, and liable to be found among those for whom being shot at by foreign enemies at least represented steady employment. Dougal, with his gift for draughtsmanship and clerical work, detoured naturally into the Engineers. The Ordnance Survey, in particular, was undertaking major mapping exercises across the country at the time, and Dougal's talents dovetailed neatly with these projects.
A little under 10 stone in weight, 5 feet 8½ inches in height, advertising himself as nineteen going on twenty (a little older than he really was), with grey eyes, brown hair, a fair complexion, no smallpox scars, and a visible vaccination mark: nothing in Dougal's medical examination compromised his enlistment. Resting, his heart beat seventy-two times per minute; he inhaled eighteen times over the same period.
Superficially, for a young man to whom physical pleasure had become a transfixing goal, all of this resembled reform – or, at least, maturation – and a sustained glow of approval radiated from Dougal's family. Away from home, and subject to the improving discipline of the military, his commendable career move demanded no second glance; but the distance Dougal had put between himself and his relatives did little, in practice, to encourage self-control. In truth, much had not changed. In April 1866, a month after his enlistment, an injury – a dislocation, caused by a 'blow against a form' – forced him into sick bay, and, since full mobility may not have been regained for thirty-six days afterwards, a tedious period of recuperation seems to have followed. Boredom was Dougal's nemesis, and it may have been during this period that he reverted to his previous thrill-seeking pattern.
On 24 October 1866, he returned to the hospital, again staying for five days. This time, however, the reason was different. Dougal had begun to see no reason why his progress within the Royal Engineers should be incompatible with his ongoing quest for sexual ecstasy, and he reported to the doctor suffering from primary syphilis. He had a lesion, a chancre, probably on his penis. In the column on the medical record sheet entitled 'Circumstances in or by which Disease was induced', the medical officer generously wrote 'contagions', but there is no doubt that Dougal had availed himself of the services of one, or very possibly more, of the local prostitutes. When he left the hospital, the chancre may have begun to respond to the doctor's prescription of lotio nigra, a solution of mercury.
It is probably the case that Dougal's sexual forays were prolific throughout his period in the Royal Engineers. He would not have been the only military man to visit prostitutes. It may also be true to say that Dougal's 'growing reputation as a sexual athlete', to use Roy Harley Lewis's phrase, meant that he could attract women as easily as he could pay for them himself, and, in fact, make a profit along the way. Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse writes that 'only his fellow-soldiers knew his private life to have been a long procession of inglorious victories over servantmaids and shopgirls, who were relieved of their virtue and their money by Dougal'. The combination of sex and money continued to animate Dougal, just as it had in London.
On the other hand, divesting innocent Kentish girls of their virginity and their money came with a built-in escape clause. When the fact that they had been tricked, and were consequently out of pocket, hit them, they were in no position to protest, lest their own sexual morals be inquired into. Social anxieties about female sexuality provided Dougal with the scope he needed to pursue his hedonistic lifestyle. The money which he took from one victim would entice another one, if he needed one. It is fair to assume that his sexual appetite, in the blush of his youth, was enormous.
Only venereal diseases stood up for the town's female population as Dougal swept through them like fire. By 19 November, he was back in the hospital for another five-day spell, complaining of orchitis, a testicular condition which can manifest itself in intense pain, swelling, and the presence of blood in the urine and in the ejaculate. This was unpleasant, and Dougal was treated with fomentations. It was also, as the doctor must have been aware, sexually transmitted, linked to chlamydia and gonorrhoea. Dougal demurely attributed his condition to 'a strain'. On 24 April 1867, just over a year after he had joined the Engineers, Dougal again went to the hospital, this time with condylomata – a rash resulting in white lesions, and a secondary feature of his syphilis, appearing a few months after the chancre. This time, he stayed for nine days, and was treated with silver nitrate. He gave the cause of this new ailment as 'filth'.
It may not have been an entire coincidence that, at this juncture, Dougal's work began to take him away from Chatham. Of course, a surveyor was little use if he was tied to his office, and whatever training Dougal may have required had probably now been completed, but it cannot have escaped the notice of his superiors that the medical problems with which Dougal reported were, more often than not, the injurious knock-on effects of his ardent sexual adventures. He had spent nearly three weeks in the hospital with venereal complaints within the first fourteen months of his service with the Royal Engineers. It was not yet a disciplinary matter, but something had to be done.
Some time in 1867 or 1868, Dougal began a tour of duty at Cork Harbour, in Ireland. If he was still affecting an Irish accent, this may have recommended him for the transfer. It is hard not to see the posting as a tactical manoeuvre on the part of Dougal's commanding officers; removing the man from the various enticements of Chatham may have been intended to help him settle down, and to encourage him to develop a more mature understanding of himself and his responsibilities. One doubts, however, that Cork was entirely free of vice; Dougal, with his sixth sense for dissolution, was accustomed to tracking it down when and where he could. Eventually, he seems to have rebelled against the discipline which the Engineers were attempting to foster within him. It is not clear whether he was back in Chatham, or whether he was in Cork, or perhaps somewhere else, but, on Tuesday 21 July 1868, he failed to report to work at 8.00a.m. At 9.00p.m., having been missing the whole day, he turned up, albeit too late to participate in the regiment's formal tattoo. For this offence, he was fined three days' pay.
Then, on Saturday 8 August, Dougal went missing again. This time, he was gone until the following Thursday. On his return, from who knows where, he found himself stripped of five days' pay and, from 15 August until 21 August, he was imprisoned, the days of his absence being deducted from his service record. It is notable that, after August 1868, Dougal never again went to the military prison. The next few years were not without some excitement – the brothel and the low-grade public house could not be taken out of the man, even if the man could be taken out of the brothel and the low-grade public house – but Dougal seems generally to have known better than to court visits to the so-called glasshouse in the future.
Re-posted again, he arrived in Chester on 23 September 1868, the disciplinary infractions of the summer still not far behind him. There was ongoing Ordnance Survey work in North Wales with which Dougal was now to assist; he would be billeted with civilians when his work took him into the dark Welsh mountains, far from base. This again seems to have been intended to impose a sense of routine on Dougal's erratic lifestyle: his breaches of the disciplinary code had revealed that his resistance to the army's strict expectations remained firm; his quest for erotic transportation remained undimmed. In Wales, his access to the raw materials of his private endeavours would probably be more limited. He may also have been expected to 'improve' as a consequence of the stunning and unspoiled scenery, which, it might have been supposed, could not fail to leave its impression on the depraved canvas of Dougal's soul.
This was really as innocent a hope as it sounds, but there were, at least initially, superficially positive indications of moral improvement. On Monday 8 March 1869, Dougal, the imperiously independent hedonist, married Lovenia Martha Griffith at Northop Church, near Mold in Flintshire. He was twenty-two; she was twenty. The marriage was announced in the Liverpool Mercury on 12 March, a public sign of the sudden and wholly unexpected leap into public respectability which Dougal was taking. It is probable that Dougal's father-in-law, a stationer, made the arrangements for the announcement to be published, and met any costs involved. For Dougal, a man who was so much at the mercy of his urges, this was all very out of character, and perhaps, as Lewis suggests, a 'major error of judgement'. The real cause of Dougal's sudden marriage is not known – it is possible that Lovenia Martha Griffith had become pregnant, forcing Dougal's hand; although, if she did, she would seem to have later miscarried.
For Dougal's part, there certainly seems to have been something distinctly involuntary in this arrangement. Domestic tranquillity and intolerable tedium were linked ideas in his mind. His wife – who seems to have been known by her middle name, Martha – was an encumbrance, and the situation, far from being one of emotional neatness and fulfilment, looked untidy. Martha was unrecognised by Dougal's employer: having failed to seek his superiors' permission to marry, Dougal 'only obtained military recognition as a married man on 12 May 1877', although Martha clearly lived with him at certain barracks in the meantime. Of course, Dougal was in denial – Martha was, no doubt, somewhere out of the way when, stupidly, he again absconded from duty at Abergele on 12 February 1870, only returning on St Valentine's Day. The episode cost him three days' pay; he probably spent the missing time with a girl. Despite his marriage, he remained stead-fastly devoted to his intemperate habits.
None of this made itself obvious to Dougal's family in London, who continued to believe that his youthful hedonism had subsided. Dougal, luxuriating in this delayed parental approval, lost little time in sending Martha down to London, and to his parents' then-home, Livingstone House, on Livingstone Road, in Battersea. In April 1871, at the time of the national census, she was listed there, with Dougal's parents, his three brothers and his sister. By now, she was twenty-one; she was also pregnant. To the onlooker, it all betokened Dougal's new-found maturity; for Dougal, it was to his advantage to keep Martha at a safe distance. She gave birth at Livingstone House on 3 June 1871. The baby was named Charles Herbert Dougal. As before, the Liverpool Mercury announced the happy event. At the time, Dougal was probably still in Wales.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Moat Farm Mystery by M.W. Oldridge. Copyright © 2012 M.W. Oldridge. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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