‘Britain’s Dreyfus Affair’: a very nasty village scandal

It has been described as Britain’s Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful imprisonment in 1903 of a half-Indian solicitor George Edalji in the Midlands and the refusal of the authorities to pay him compensation, even though he was later pardoned.

In a case tainted by racism, class prejudice and plain stupidity, Edalji was accused of mutilating horses, sheep and cattle, and then forging letters to implicate others, thus creating mayhem in the village of Great Wyrley where he lived, in a mining district in Staffordshire. His cause was taken up by a home-grown Zola in the form of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who was happy to replicate the investigatory skills of his famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes.

With the help of insights into the Parsee background of Edalji’s family in India, and recently discovered papers about the police response to the affair, Shrabani Basu has sought to breathe new life into a story which has had many airings but never quite caught the public imagination, certainly not in J’Accuse terms.