From Munro’s files.
Letter apparently to Goodman:
16 GREAT STUART STREET
EDINBURGH 3
___-___ ____
1.4.69
Dear Sir,
I have read your book on the Wallace case with great interest and I’d like to make a few comments on it.
I was present at the first hearing in the magistrates court when the ineffable Ward committed Wallace for trial. Bur what I’d like to tell you (and what you can’t repeat) is that Schofield Allen was responsible (I think) for the case going to the Assizes. He became flustered irritable and said things to Ward like “Rumour is a lying jade” (!!) while Dick Bishop, handsome, humonous (sic: humongous, humorous?) and a bit of a bully quite obviously decided that he was going to fix his fussy little opponent. (I know S. Allen and I like him but he was much less practices as a speaker in those days.) If the toles had been reversed in the magistrate’s court, Bishop would have seen to it that the Wallace case would have ended there.
(At the Assizes, by the way, Bishop said to me, “Look at the jury: not a buck rabbit among ’em!”)
TORRY was the name of the author, not Terry. He invited Wallace to stay with him afterwards. He’s dead now – and I’m afraid his novels won’t live either. But he was genuinely shocked by the trial, and worked hard.
The good-looking woman in the Appeal Committe photograph was my mother (Also dead). She wrote a very good letter to the L’pool Post about the trial “C.C.Fraser”) and we all set about collecting for the Appeal. Most people, as you say, believed him to be guilty(“He done it, all right”) and were quite unpleasant about contributing to the cause (as I firmly saw it) of Justice. After attending the trial and hearing Hemmerde and PARTICULARLY MacFall (I sat just under him as he gave his almost insane evidence) I felt that if any one could be sentence to death on the evidence presented at that trial then not one of us was safe.
Wallace was a singularly unattractive man in both manner and appearance. After his acquittal he came to tea_ my parents and myself, and a dreary festivity it was. His brother was much more human and sociable. However, I derived a lot of amusement from the behaviour of my mother’s _ little maid who had invited all her friends in to have a look at the celebrity. She fitted them up with caps and aprons (never?) has a Church of Scotland minister had such a domestic _. I noticed, by the way, that when our cat came into the room Wallace, quite unconsciously, bent down to stroke it as it passed. Obviously a compulsive cat-stroker.
Now about Mr. X [Parry]. I know the name as you, of course, do. _(that’s?) my English-Scotch-Welsh). When, after Wallace’s death, I saw his name in the paper for assaulting a girl on the outskirts of Liverpool, also a reference to him having robbed a telephone booth (telephones, aha!) I said to either Moore or Gold whom I happened to meet, “Now then, Latin me that, me _ Trinity(?) Scholar” (or words to that effect), the inspector looked (defiant?) and uncomfortable and muttered something about a coincidence…..Yxxxxxxxxxxxx Hemmerde (to whom you are a little unfair: he had a good voice and his manners were good: you make him sound as though he were a common ranter, which he wasn’t) told me that Mr. X. was in prison at the time of the murder. Someone said that Mr. X. has since died, but I, like one of your reviewers, still hope that he may confess _ (although I don’t think that, by his name, he can be a Catholic) _talk in his sleep….
Yours truly,
(Mrs). Maud Budd__
Jonathan Goodman Esq.
