Dr Edward Pritchard

Dr Edward William Pritchard was a familiar figure in mid-Victorian Glasgow: bearded, sociable, fond of telling stories about his travels and anxious to be noticed. In the spring of 1865 his mother-in-law and then his wife died at his home in Sauchiehall Street after long, agonising illnesses that he himself was treating. Within weeks he was in prison. His trial exposed one of the most cold-blooded poisonings of the century, and on 28 July 1865 he became the last person to be executed in public in Glasgow, in front of a crowd estimated at around 100,000.

A plausible doctor

Pritchard was born in Southsea, in Hampshire, on 6 December 1825, into a naval family. He trained in medicine and served for several years as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy, sailing widely. In Portsmouth he met Mary Jane Taylor, the daughter of a prosperous retired Edinburgh silk merchant, and they married in 1851. The couple had five children.

Leaving the navy, Pritchard set up in general practice in Yorkshire, where he wrote about his travels and about the water cure, but he left under a cloud and in debt, and in 1859 he moved to Glasgow. There he built a practice partly on charm and self-promotion. He lectured, joined societies, handed round signed photographs of himself and claimed acquaintance with famous men. Some colleagues found him vain and unreliable. Few imagined he was dangerous.

The fire at Berkeley Terrace

On 5 May 1863 fire broke out in the family’s home at 11 Berkeley Terrace, in the west end. A servant, Elizabeth McGrain, aged 25, died in her room. The fire had started there, yet she appeared to have made no attempt to escape, which suggested that she was unconscious or already dead before it began. The procurator fiscal looked into the death, and the insurance company declined to pay out, but no charge was ever brought. After the events of 1865 many people came to believe that Pritchard had killed her too. He was never tried for it, and it remains a suspicion rather than a proven crime.

The house in Sauchiehall Street

By 1865 the Pritchards were living at 131 Sauchiehall Street, a building that still stands under a later street number. The household included the children and a fifteen-year-old servant, Mary McLeod, with whom Pritchard was having a sexual relationship. From late 1864 his wife fell repeatedly ill with sickness, cramps and weakness. She recovered while staying with her family in Edinburgh, and fell ill again when she returned to Glasgow.

In February 1865 her mother, Jane Taylor, aged 70, came to Sauchiehall Street to nurse her. Within weeks she too was dead. Pritchard certified the cause as paralysis and apoplexy. His wife’s suffering continued until she died in March. He certified gastric fever. At her funeral he insisted that the coffin be opened so that he could kiss her goodbye, weeping as he did so, a scene that later earned him the nickname the human crocodile.

One doctor had seen enough to be alarmed. Dr James Paterson, called in to see Mrs Pritchard, suspected poisoning and refused to sign a death certificate for Mrs Taylor, but he did not go to the authorities himself, a silence for which he was heavily criticised. The alarm came instead from an anonymous letter to the procurator fiscal. The bodies of both women were exhumed, and the analysis showed that both had been poisoned with antimony, with evidence of aconite as well. Pritchard was arrested and held in the North Prison in Duke Street to await trial.

The trial in Edinburgh

Pritchard was tried before the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh in July 1865 in a hearing that lasted five days. The presiding judge was the Lord Justice-Clerk, Lord Glencorse, who as John Inglis had defended Madeleine Smith eight years earlier. The evidence was circumstantial, since nobody had seen Pritchard give the poison, but it was overwhelming. He had bought antimony and aconite on account from local chemists. He had prepared and given his wife food and medicine, including tapioca, cheese and egg-flip, and both women had sickened after taking what he gave them. Above all, he had signed death certificates and sworn declarations that were shown by the post-mortem examinations to be false.

The defence tried to suggest that Mary McLeod was responsible. The young servant was made to admit her relationship with her employer in open court, a humiliation for which there was no remedy. On 7 July 1865 the jury found Pritchard guilty of both murders and he was sentenced to death.

Confessions

In the condemned cell Pritchard wrote a series of statements. The first denied killing his mother-in-law and claimed that Mary McLeod had been an accomplice in his wife’s death. Shortly before his execution he made a fuller confession, admitting both murders, saying he could give no motive beyond a kind of terrible madness and drink, and stating that he alone, not Mary McLeod, had poisoned his wife. It was the one service he did the girl he had used.

The last public hanging in Glasgow

Pritchard was hanged at eight o’clock on the morning of Friday 28 July 1865 by the executioner William Calcraft. The gallows stood in Jail Square, at the foot of the Saltmarket in front of the court and prison buildings facing Glasgow Green, the traditional place of execution in the city. Contemporary estimates put the crowd at around 100,000 people, many of whom had gathered through the night.

It was the last public execution in Glasgow. Three years later, in 1868, Parliament moved executions inside prison walls, and the last public hanging in Scotland took place at Dumfries that year. Glasgow’s later executions were carried out privately inside prison walls, at Duke Street from 1902 and then at Barlinnie.

Dr Paterson’s dilemma

The most uncomfortable figure in the story, after Pritchard himself, is Dr James Paterson. Called to see Mrs Pritchard, he formed the view that she was being poisoned, and when Mrs Taylor died he declined to certify the death and indicated to the registrar that it was unexpected. But he did not go to the procurator fiscal, and he did not warn the family. Mrs Pritchard died some weeks later.

Paterson defended himself on the ground of professional etiquette: he had been called in by Pritchard as a colleague, and in his view it was not his place to accuse another doctor. The public and much of the medical press found that answer inadequate, and the controversy fed a long debate about the duty of a doctor who suspects foul play. The case was one of several in the Victorian era that slowly pushed medicine towards the principle that a patient’s safety must come before loyalty to a colleague.

The record of a lie

Pritchard’s crimes left an unusual mark in Scotland’s official records. The causes of death he had certified were entered in the statutory registers in the normal way. Once the truth emerged at the trial, the real causes, poisoning by antimony and aconite administered by her husband, were recorded for both women in the Register of Corrected Entries, while the original entries were left untouched. Together they remain a permanent record of a murderer’s lies.

The case also changed attitudes within medicine. The debate over Dr Paterson’s silence raised hard questions about what a doctor should do when he suspects a colleague, and the whole affair became one of the most discussed poisoning cases of the Victorian era. Alongside the case of Madeleine Smith, the Sandyford Place murder and the Oscar Slater affair, it forms part of the cluster of cases that Jack House called Glasgow’s square mile of murder.

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