The case of the ‘Hay Poisoner’ inspired many a cosy murder mystery

The case of the retired major Herbert Rowse Armstrong, a Hay-on-Wye solicitor hanged in 1922 for killing his wife Katharine with arsenic, is one of nine examined in George Orwell’s 1946 Tribune essay ‘The Decline of the English Murder’ as having enthralled the public. ‘A little man of the professional class’, living an ‘intensely respectable life’, nevertheless, for reasons that appear somehow underpowered (in Armstrong’s case a change to his wife’s will and a romantic friendship, probably never consummated, with a woman he met in Bournemouth during the war), finds himself resorting to the bathroom cabinet or garden shed (‘the means chosen should, of course, be poison’) with heinous intent, and is only brought to justice after slipping up over some ‘tiny, unforeseeable detail’.

From the account of Armstrong’s trial, which takes up around half of Stephen Bates’s book, it becomes abundantly clear that both the court case itself and the investigation which preceded it were conducted shockingly badly. The judge, Mr Justice Darling, was openly on the side of the prosecution. His career was drawing to a close, and it is suggested that he wanted to try the black cap on for size once more before hanging up his robes. Another Welsh solicitor had been acquitted of poisoning his wife a year or so before, and to let a second one go might have looked like carelessness. Eminent scientists handed down speculative and actively misleading pathological and toxicological testimony as if they were Moses returned from Sinai, and attempts to cross-examine them were stifled by the judge. Any hopes of appeal were stymied by the lawyers’ ingrained reluctance to admit to a mistake, whether collectively or personally. Astonishingly, the attorney general, who had served as prosecuting counsel, also had the power to refuse an appeal to the House of Lords, which he duly did.