Kitabı oxu: «Murder on the Verandah: Love and Betrayal in British Malaya»

1
‘Blood, blood. I’ve shot a man’

When she returned to her bungalow that Sunday evening, Mrs Proudlock changed from the pink dress with black spots she had worn to church to a pale-green, sleeveless tea gown with a revealing neckline. An odd choice, perhaps, for an evening of letter-writing. She chose the garment, she said later, not because it showed her to good effect, but because it was pleasantly cool. Thus arrayed, she checked to see that her daughter was sleeping (she was), fetched a blotter and an ink-stand and set to work on her correspondence.

She and her husband, William, had moved into this bungalow the previous January. Surrounded on three sides by the Klang river, it stood in the grounds of the Victoria Institution (VI), Kuala Lumpur’s premier school. Normally, B. E. Shaw, VI’s headmaster, lived here but, four months earlier, Shaw and his family had gone to England on leave. In his absence, Proudlock had been named acting headmaster, which entitled him to use Shaw’s house until the latter returned in October.

It was an attractive bungalow. Though it no longer exists – it was demolished when the Klang river, prone to flooding, was rerouted in the late 1920s – Richard Sidney, who succeeded Shaw in 1922, described it in British Malaya Today as made of wood and mounted on brick piles ‘which get higher as the ground slopes towards the river – ordinarily some 30 yards distant’. The house had its own tennis court and was fairly large, he went on. It ‘has rooms bounded by wide verandahs’. The verandah on which Mrs Proudlock wrote her letters that evening contained several of her potted plants, but most of the other furnishings belonged to Mrs Shaw: a rectangular table and some chairs arranged on a square of carpet; a long bookshelf below which was a teapoy; and a large rattan chair bearing some of Ethel’s cushions. Light was provided by a single bulb suspended from the ceiling.

The bungalow faced High Street, normally one of Kuala Lumpur’s busiest, but this being a Sunday, it was quiet. What sounds there were were muffled by rain. It had been drizzling much of the day and now, as darkness fell, there was a cloudburst, the rain falling so hard that it obscured the 5-foot-high perimeter hedge that divided the school grounds from the street.

Mrs Proudlock was halfway through her second letter when a rickshaw bearing Steward drew up. Less than half an hour later, he was dead. According to Mrs Proudlock’s version of events, she was not expecting visitors that evening and had been startled by his arrival. Assuming that Steward had come to see her husband, she informed him that Will was having dinner with a colleague who lived on Brickfields Road, a mile and a half away. If Steward wished, she said, he could see him there. When Steward showed himself reluctant to leave, she suggested he sit down. They made small-talk, she said, discussing the rain and its impact on the rising river. For something to say, Mrs Proudlock mentioned religion, asking Steward if he had been to church that evening. He explained that he attended church very rarely. ‘Then you’re like my husband,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’ll show you a book he’s reading.’ She walked to the bookshelf and took down a copy of Leslie Stephen’s An Agnostic’s Apology. She was handing it to Steward when he tried to kiss her. She pushed him away. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. ‘Are you mad?’

Steward answered by grabbing her right wrist and, with his left hand, turned off the light. Frightened now, she tried to break free – and couldn’t. When Steward began to raise her dress, she seized his hand and wrenched it away. ‘He pulled me towards him,’ Mrs Proudlock said. ‘He had one arm around my waist and the other on my left shoulder.’

Steward now tried to force her against the wall and, afraid that she might fall, Mrs Proudlock reached out to steady herself. That is when her hand came in contact with a revolver, belonging to her husband, lying on the table.

‘I think I must have fired twice then,’ she said. Terror had made her mind go blank, she explained, and she couldn’t be more precise. ‘The next thing I remember I was stumbling. I think it was on the steps [of the verandah], but I’m not sure.’

The shots, striking Steward in the neck and chest, were heard by the rickshaw puller whom Steward had told to wait on High Street. Thinking that help might be needed, the puller was approaching the house, he later told the police, when the door burst open and Steward stumbled down the steps and lurched in his direction. Steward was clutching his chest. Fearing for his own life, the puller fled and had made it as far as the street when three more shots rang out. Glancing back, he saw Ethel Proudlock, gun in hand and still wearing her pale-green tea-gown, standing over Steward’s body.

Mrs Proudlock, who claimed to be in a state of shock, said she did not recall following Steward out of the house, nor did she recall shooting him three times in the head while he lay, clinging to life, on the rain-soaked ground. She said it was several minutes before she came to her senses. That was when she called to her cook, who was resting in his room, and ordered him to fetch her husband.

When Proudlock, accompanied by Goodman Ambler, a teaching colleague and the man with whom he had just had dinner, arrived fifteen minutes later, his wife staggered towards him, moaning: ‘Blood, blood. I’ve shot a man.’

‘Whom?’ he demanded.

‘Mr Steward,’ she said.

‘Where is he?’

‘He ran, he ran.’

Mrs Proudlock, her husband would later testify, was incoherent, her dress bore bloodstains, and her hair was in disarray.

When the police arrived, they found Steward, wearing a white suit, brown boots and a mackintosh, lying on his face in a pool of blood. The body was still warm, the Malay Mail reported next day, ‘and the frightful injuries were a testimony to the terrible execution of the Webley revolver … lying some distance away’. According to one police official, there was fresh blood on the Webley’s barrel, and Steward’s watch was still ticking.

The body was removed to the European Hospital in an ambulance cart. Horse-drawn and equipped with rubber tyres – in 1911, still something of a novelty – the cart would have been a tight squeeze for Steward. Just a few months earlier, the Mail had denounced it as absurdly inadequate. It was so short, the paper said, that to accommodate taller patients the back door had to be left open. As if being murdered was not enough, Steward suffered the added indignity of travelling to hospital with his feet protruding.

* * *

Next day the Mail reported that the decapitated body of a Tamil had been found near the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus and that a Chinese man had drowned himself after stabbing his wife. The paper’s English readers were unlikely to have paid either item much attention. The talking point that Monday, as it would be for weeks to come, was the story on page 5. Under the headline ‘Kuala Lumpur Tragedy; Former Mine Manager Shot Dead; A Distressing Story’, it began: ‘We regret to record a tragedy which created a profound sensation in Kuala Lumpur when the news became generally known this morning.’

Also that Monday, Mrs Proudlock, accompanied by her husband and still thought to be a woman who had killed to protect her honour, made a court appearance lasting all of three minutes. No evidence was presented, the court expressing the wish that she be spared as much embarrassment as possible. The proceedings ended with her being formally charged with causing William Steward’s death – a legal necessity since she herself admitted to killing him. Despite the gravity of the charge, the court took the unusual step of refusing to remand her in custody – no doubt also to spare her feelings – and Mrs Proudlock was released on the payment of two sureties to the amount of $1,000 provided by her father, Robert Charter. A further hearing was fixed for 1st May.

Steward’s funeral at 5.30 that Monday afternoon was a forlorn affair. An obituary in the Mail lauded him as an energetic miner and, more important in British eyes, an enthusiastic rugby player. But neither his energy nor his enthusiasm seem to have gained him much. A mere fifteen people attended his burial in the Venning Road cemetery, a short distance from Kuala Lumpur’s new railway station.

Until a year or two earlier, much ceremony had attended the burial of Britons. At the European Hospital, the coffin was placed on a hand bier and, under escort, was drawn to the cemetery by a detail of splendid-looking Sikh policemen. But in 1909, the police department, for reasons of economy, had ended the practice. Now the bier was drawn by the cemetery’s Javanese gardeners. A bit of a come-down, this; and not everyone was pleased. ‘In common with many other people,’ the Mail complained, ‘we feel the time has come when it should no longer be necessary to call upon Javanese gardeners or anyone else of an alien race or creed to draw the body of a deceased European along public roads to its last resting place.’

Steward’s funeral service was performed by the Revd P. Grahame, a man new to Kuala Lumpur and new as well to presiding over the burials of murder victims. One can imagine his difficulty when recording the event that night in St Mary’s register. Under the heading ‘Cause of Death’, Grahame settled finally for the words ‘bullet wounds’. Surrounded as they are by a long list of deaths due to more conventional causes – malaria, dysentery, convulsions and beri-beri – the words when I saw them in 1996 made my blood run cold.

Steward was a shy man and, beyond turning out for a rugby match once in a while, socialized little. He visited the Selangor Club from time to time and, while there, would sometimes share a drink with William Proudlock. He liked Proudlock as much as he had liked anyone, but for all that, he did not have many friends. In 1911, men in Kuala Lumpur spent a lot of time in one another’s company, partly because there were not many British women, and partly because, most having been to public schools, they enjoyed other men. Steward seems to have been different. For one thing, most of these men drank a lot; Steward was fairly abstentious. For another, in company, he was ill-at-ease. The bluster and heartiness in the Selangor Club’s Long Bar would not have been to his taste. Once in a while, Proudlock prevailed upon him to attend one of his musical ‘at homes’ but, as hard as he tried, he never succeeded in getting Steward to sing. While the others belted out ‘The Road to Mandalay’, Steward would sit silently and stare at his shoes.

No one seemed to know much about Steward. He was understood to have been living with a Chinese woman – true, it turned out; he was believed to be forty years old – false: he was closer to thirty-four; and he was thought to have come from somewhere in the British Midlands. In fact, he came from Whitehaven in Cumberland, where he had a mother and a sister with whom he corresponded several times a month. He also helped to support them and regularly sent them money – an income on which they had come to depend and would now greatly miss.

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.