Murder on the Verandah: Love and Betrayal in British Malaya

3

A Profound Sensation

The Proudlock case transfixed Malaya. ‘In the history of the FMS,’ said a Mail editorial, ‘the case is without a parallel … It is not exaggerating … to say that news of the death sentence passed upon the accused woman came as a great shock throughout Selangor and further afield.’

To understand the trial’s impact, it is necessary to bear in mind that, in 1911, there were only 700 Britons in Kuala Lumpur and a little over 1,200 in the entire FMS. This was a relatively small group whose members, bound by culture and language and social background, took an obsessive, almost familial interest in one another. No matter how trivial, everything they did was considered news. In the Mail, items such as, ‘Mr P. C. Russell has taken to a motorbicycle’, and ‘We regret to learn that Mrs Noel Walker is laid up with rheumatic gout’, were daily fare. Banal fare, perhaps, but then British Malaya was a banal place. Nothing much happened there. The British were ever complaining that the country was dull. Ethel Proudlock changed all that. One of their own had been convicted of murder. Not only was the victim English – which introduced an element of fratricide – but the perpetrator was a woman. Ethel Proudlock had violated two taboos – three if you counted her infidelity. The British in Malaya were understandably stunned.

What worried them particularly was the impact this would have on their standing, not just locally as the standard-bearers of civilization, but in England, where many people saw them as sybarites, a charge that deeply offended them. In their own estimation, they were models of rectitude: conscientious, enterprising, industrious – everything one would expect of a group whose job it was to build an empire. At great risk to themselves, they believed, they had come to Malaya to bring civilization to a backward people And did those at Home (in the Mail, ‘Home’ was always capitalized) thank them for it? Quite the contrary; they were defamed and vilified.

Few in England knew anything about Malaya. They were ignorant of the heat, the insects, the monotony, the risks to life and limb. They couldn’t even find it on the map. Letters were for ever turning up in the FMS capital addressed to Kuala Lumpur, India; Kuala Lumpur, China; Kuala Lumpur, Tibet; even – and this is my favourite – Kuala Lumpur, Asia Minor. ‘This diversity, of course, has its charm,’ the Mail remarked in 1910, ‘but it’s not particularly gratifying to those who think that the FMS should, owing to their increasing importance, be brought geographically to an anchor.’

They had been brought to an anchor now. Word of the Proudlock trial quickly spread beyond Malaya. It became a topic of conversation not just in India and Australia, Canada and New Zealand, but in the British capital itself. ‘Several London newspapers which arrived … last night’, the Mail reported with some embarrassment, ‘publish fairly long reports of the Kuala Lumpur tragedy. One paper devotes nearly a column to the affair under the heading, Sensational Case in British Colony.’ (Another gratuitous offence, this: the Straits Settlements were a colony; the Federated Malay States were a protectorate.) People were finally talking about Malaya, but what they were saying did not redound to its credit.

Small though the British community was, Steward’s murder polarized it. Some saw the trial as a travesty and claimed that a gross injustice had been done. A decent woman had defended her honour and, instead of being celebrated for her courage, now found herself under sentence of death. It was unconscionable, these people said, none more passionately than ‘Irishman’.

In a letter to the Mail, ‘Irishman’ described Mrs Proudlock as a modest, quiet and unassuming woman, devoted to her husband and her daughter. ‘I put it to the community at large,’ he wrote, ‘is not a woman justified in defending her honour which, to many, is dearer than their lives? Or are we to consider our wives and daughters so little above the brute creation that a defence of their honour is unjustified by the laws of the land we live in.’ Having had his say, he felt compelled to explain himself: ‘I append the nom de plume Irishman … because although we are impulsive and demonstrative as a race, in no country in the world is the honour of women held in higher reverence.’

There were other testimonials. ‘Having known Ethel Proudlock intimately for the past 11 years,’ ‘FMS’ wrote, ‘I feel it is due her to say that, in all those years, I have found her to be sincere, truthful, modest and chaste in conversation.’ Another letter a day later applauded her bravery: ‘The death sentence is little likely to prevent the English woman doing her duty in a similar emergency, I trust. Thank God that there are many of them of Mrs Proudlock’s pluck.’

Modest? Chaste? Death before dishonour? Even in 1911, there were parts of the world where much of this would have sounded dated. British Malaya, though, was not one of them. Though Victoria had died a decade earlier, Kuala Lumpur was still very much a Victorian enclave. Many of its inhabitants had come to the FMS in the 1890s and, by 1911, the values and attitudes they’d taken with them, instead of withering had, if anything, grown more vigorous. An example of this is the view they took of women.

One of the most popular books in the Kuala Lumpur Book Club – facetiously known as the Dump of Secondhand Books – was John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies. The volume contained what may be Ruskin’s most famous lecture, ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’. The lecture – a key Victorian document and hugely influential – defined the ideal woman as a creature both sweet and passive, obedient and gentle, pliant and self-deprecating. The title refers to Ruskin’s view that a home run by a woman conscious of her responsibilities is more than just a dwelling place; it becomes a place of enchantment, a garden graced by a queen.

In 1911 in Malaya, women were still expected to conform to the Ruskin paradigm: a person who didn’t seek to realize herself, but was content to be her husband’s instrument – his subject, even. Always aware of the duty she bore him, she ministered to his needs and deferred to his better judgement. If called upon to do so, she was ready ‘to suffer and be still’ – the words Sarah Stickney Ellis used in 1845 to describe a woman’s highest duty. But a life of self-renunciation was not enough; she had also to be pure. Purity was a woman’s greatest asset. Take it away and she promptly became a brute. It was a woman’s job to civilize men, to raise them up. (Here, her task was analogous to that of Malaya’s empire-builders.) She had to be ‘the angel in the home’, a moral touchstone to whom others turned for guidance. It was on this account that the so-called fallen woman inspired such horror. A woman who strayed from the path of virtue didn’t just jeopardize her own life, she jeopardized the lives of those who most depended on her: her husband, whose shame now made him the object of scorn; and her offspring, who would ever bear the taint of their mother’s sin.

Mrs Proudlock, if she did not own one herself, would certainly have been familiar with a print that hung in many Malayan homes: Augustus Egg’s Past and Present No. 1. It depicts a man, slumped in a chair and deep in shock, clutching in his left hand a letter apprising him of his wife’s adultery. His wife, meanwhile, has collapsed at his feet – the collapse as much moral as physical – while his two small daughters, motherless now and little understanding the tragedy that has overtaken them, innocently build a house of cards.

Concupiscence in a wife was considered monstrous, not least because it threatened the social and moral order. During sex, men liked to believe, a woman gritted her teeth and tried valiantly to think of higher things: her garden, perhaps, or her needlepoint. An adulteress was worse than a whore who, very often, could blame her degradation on poverty. A middle-class woman had no such excuse. She was a person of means, even if, in most cases, those means belonged to her husband.

In British Malaya, as in other parts of the empire, the erring woman was an object of such revulsion that even murder inspired less horror. During the trial, the British were not nearly as concerned that Mrs Proudlock had killed a man as they were that she might have broken her marriage vows. Ethel knew this as well as anyone which is why, speaking through her lawyer, she told the court that as much as her life meant to her, her reputation mattered more. It is also why the Mail expressed such satisfaction when Sercombe Smith gave the allegations of adultery short shrift. ‘The insinuations made against the moral character of Mrs. Proudlock were very serious,’ said the paper, ‘and we will be supported by everyone when we express our pleasure at their withdrawal and the manner in which [the judge] laid emphasis on the fact that she was completely cleared of any such imputation.’

While ‘Irishman’ and others like him continued to proclaim Ethel Proudlock’s innocence, while petitions circulated and defence funds were set up, while cables were sent to the British king, and people demanded a return to the jury system, there were those who believed that the condemned woman had got her just desserts.

Rumours abounded. It was whispered that Ethel had been in love with Steward for over a year and had been seen more than once hurrying to his home in Salak South; that she despised her husband and longed to be rid of him; that she and Steward had meant to elope.

It was also claimed that she had had not just one affair, but several – and some of those concurrently. In one of the more sensational versions of what supposedly transpired that night, it wasn’t Ethel who killed Steward, but a second suitor who, dropping by on a whim, took it amiss that another was making free with the object of his affections.

The source of this story was an Indian nightwatchman who, minutes after hearing the shots, claimed to have seen a fully-dressed Englishman swim across the Klang river, then in flood and swarming with crocodiles. Since Ethel now had a corpse on her hands, fleeing like that was hardly gallant, but because the killer was a favourite of hers – the story gets more and more outlandish – she sacrificed herself to save him, telling the police it was she who pulled the trigger.

In another version, no less bizarre, William Proudlock was the killer. Having learned that his wife had taken a lover, he set a trap for Steward that Sunday, waiting in the hedge until the miner turned up and then dispatching him. Why, then, did Mrs Proudlock stand trial? Because, this story goes, her husband threatened to expose her: unless she admitted to the crime, he would reveal her to the world as an adulteress.

So many theories. For most, the temptation to speculate was irresistible. Even Mabel Marsh succumbed. According to Marsh, the normally sensible headmistress at KL’s Methodist Girls’ School, it was William Proudlock who had tired of Ethel, not the other way around, and it was he who wanted a divorce. But how? The lady was above reproach. So Will recruited Steward and a plan was hatched: Steward would go to the bungalow, seduce Ethel, and Will would ‘discover’ them in flagrante. But the fates willed otherwise, and when Will got home, after being delayed by all that rain, Steward was already cold.

In a letter to the Mail, one man dismissed these stories as mean-spirited and vicious and accused his countrymen of lacking chivalry. ‘How men can attack a defenceless woman in her darkest hour of overwhelming grief is a mystery,’ he wrote. ‘Surely such conduct is altogether inconsistent with the conduct of a man and that of a gentleman.’

As the controversy grew, even Sercombe Smith came in for criticism. The charges became so virulent in some cases that the Mail had to tell its readers to desist. While it sympathized with Mrs Proudlock, the paper said, ‘we decline to associate ourselves with the hysterical outbursts which have followed the judicial decision … Correspondence has already appeared in our columns touching upon the case, and the opinions of our readers will receive publicity within limits. But for those who have gone to all kinds of adjectival extremes in the attempt to splutter forth their wrath against the judge and assessors, it may be added that their effusions will find the oblivion of the waste-paper basket.’

The attack was now taken up by Capital, a paper published in Calcutta. Describing the trial as ‘a powerful and fearful failure of justice’, Capital said it evoked the worst excesses of Bardell vs. Pickwick. ‘The verdict is ridiculous,’ it went on. ‘If, as the prosecution endeavoured to prove, the man was lured to the house with the intention that he should be shot out of revenge, jealousy or pique, no mercy should be shown. If, on the other hand, the unfortunate woman shot the wretch in defence of her honour, who will dare to say she was wrong? It comes to this: that in the FMS a woman who defends her honour must look for no mercy from a British judge and assessors.’

Sercombe Smith, it said, was a buffoon who had prostituted his office ‘and defiled the ermine which British judges are supposed to wear’. Capital then proposed some rough justice of its own. It was time to apply lynch law, it suggested. Tar and feather the man. And when that was done, string him up.

All this was profoundly gratifying to the Proudlock camp. The authorities, though, were not amused. When the Times of Malaya, a paper published in Ipoh, reprinted the Capital article, the government denounced it as defamatory and went to law. The editor of the Times, having badly underestimated official sensitivities, now tried to make amends. He issued an apology in which he described the article as ‘abominable and scurrilous’. The government was not appeased, however, and, on 31 July, a court ordered the editor to pay a fine of $350.

Horace Bleackley, author of A Tour in Southern Asia, now added to the furore by suggesting that assaults like the one Ethel supposedly endured were not uncommon. Malaya, he said, was full of men like Steward, whom he characterized as one of the many satyrs ‘infecting’ those colonies where men outnumber women. This was considered a low blow, not least because Bleackley made these charges in a letter to London’s Daily Mail. The community was outraged: one of its own had betrayed it. The Malay Mail thought so, too. ‘We are not aware’, the paper said in an editorial, ‘that less respect and consideration are shown for European ladies in communities in Selangor than in an ordinary London suburban community. We may go further than that and say that quite the contrary is the case. We have the idea that nowhere at Home are women more honoured and esteemed than here, and there are no signs that the position held by them for so long is likely to change.’

It did not change. Writing as late as 1932, George Bilainkin, who edited Penang’s Straits Echo, complained that women were still being treated as if they were royals. ‘In the tropics,’ he wrote, ‘the simplest looking woman keeps every man on his mettle, for the plainest woman is a goddess.’ As Bilainkin described it, this made for extravagant behaviour. ‘Men are everywhere,’ he went on, ‘paying them idiotic compliments, running almost to greet them, jumping up as soon as they show signs of rising – spreading a smile as wide as a cat’s at a woman’s sign of willingness to dance.’

The authorities in Malaya had badly underestimated the impact of the Proudlock case. Could they have known the uproar it would cause and the divisions it would engender, it is unlikely that Ethel would ever have been tried. When the death sentence was handed down, there were complaints that the judge had been over-zealous; that he had failed to understand the intentions of those in power.