The meanings of photographs in case files for murder trials: part one of three

Last month’s blog post was about how my personal experiences have influenced my handling of sources in my research, including photographs. Though photographs of crime scenes are the main source around which my research pivots, I am also interested in the meanings of photographs as material and emotive objects in the files. This blog post in three parts uses four different case studies to explore some of the multiple meanings of photographs in the case files.

Part One: Brian and Moira and what crime scene photographs can do

In the case of the murder of Moira by her husband Brian in Kensal Town in the late 1950s, the photographs in the case file provide a unique window into the past. The building no longer exists, designated a slum at the time the family were living there, and demolished sometime after. Following Moira’s death and Brian’s imprisonment, their neighbours were rehoused under London County Council schemes, and their multiple-occupancy Victorian terrace homes replaced with modern blocks of flats. Historicising this moment of change is complicated. On the one hand historians have argued that more modern buildings with improved facilities and amenities (hot and cold running water, a private toilet for each household, separate entrances, central heating, better cooking and food-storage facilities, fitted kitchens) improved working-class people’s lives in this period. On the other hand, families and communities were dislocated, moved to the suburbs with less easy access to work and kin. Social identities, networks and senses of belonging were eroded, remembered decades later with nostalgic longing.

Brian and Moira’s file provides a fascinating case study of working-class life in post-war London. It illuminates some of the key themes in the historiography of housing and social identity and change in the period, and detailed experiences and meanings can be read from the rich sources. Letters, depositions, statements, observations, evidence lists, plans and trial transcripts in the files, when read critically, have much to say about how this family were experiencing the specific moment of late-1950s London, and what the police and judicial system thought about their home and the way they lived. As I described in my last post, I am acutely aware of the different groups of people who have had an influence on the documents in the files, their provenance, creation and preservation. Trial transcripts, kept in separate files than the majority of the depositions, photographs and other documents, for example, can give details about the processes that brought the evidence into being, and provide points over which details can be contested. 

For example, when questioned about his statement in court, Brian was able to attempt to challenge some of the prosecution counsel's narrative of the crime. His mother, on the other hand, couldn't remember some of the statement she had made to police weeks earlier, and admitted that she drew some of her knowledge of her daughter-in-law's death from newspaper accounts of it. This is important because in every case I have examined from 1930 to 1970, defence and prosecution counsels used details of people's lives and, crucially for my research, their homes, to discredit them as reliable witnesses or sources of truth. Sexual relationships outside of marriage and marital breakdowns were particular points of interest, of which even an insinuation could be used by the court to imply that a witness, defendant or victim was unreliable, untrustworthy, or of poor moral character. But in many cases the domestic behaviour they highlighted had little direct relevance to the murder the defendant was being tried for.

In 1956 Brian and Moira were separated and Moira was living with her family up North. Brian wrote to his wife about coming back, commenting on her condition that he give her ‘a decent home to come home to’, describing how he was doing up their flat. In the middle of his efforts to improve the place on a budget he encountered builders working on the exterior of a neighbouring building who told him that the landlord had stopped the work because London County Council were purchasing the buildings for demolition and rehousing the residents. Brian was ecstatic: ‘We've really hit the jackpot now, Doll!’ he told his wife. This was their ticket to a better home. But his letter reveals that they would struggle to pay the much higher rent of a council flat, and they would have to find the money to outfit their new place with furniture. They didn't have much in their present home. This is interesting because it adds colour and detail to histories of post-war that describe the improvement to working-class people’s quality of life brought about by improved housing. The move wasn't that simple for those with little money. ‘Affluence’ and new consumerism hadn't reached people like Brian and Moira in the late 1950s, a fact to which photographs of their home attest. Even after Brian had made significant improvements, they still had little makeshift furniture, poor facilities for cooking and washing up, shared a toilet with at least two other families, and lived in only two rooms. This photograph of one view of the main living space in their rented flat shows an unfinished home-made chair and wardrobe:

When Brian finished redecorating this room (a few months before the photograph was taken) he described it in his letter to his wife:

'I have decorated the kitchen – after taking down every single piece of wood I had put up plus the hanging cupboard over the cooker… and that wooden waist rail all round the room. I had a helluver lot of plastering to do besides what I found beneath the old wallpaper when I took it off but it has turned out OK. I have bought one of those spray guns and sprayed the ceiling BLACK! and everybody likes it! Used a yellow paper on the complete fireplace wall and a greyish paper on t’other three. Enough paint dripped on the floor to encourage me to spray that as well. I've bought a small (4’ 3” x 2’ 3”) contemporary rug sort of green, black, white and yellow geometric pattern – an Axminster. My new shelves are quite small compared with those you knew and they are in the corner above the cooker and sink. I have started a new fireplace somewhat similar to our other room but it’s even longer! I intend panelling behind the cooker and sink and boxing both in… The skirting, window frame and door have yet to be painted but I haven’t decided on the colour yellow black or red... Incidentally, the old iron fireplace is still there but completely covered.'

His letter features in the case file as an exhibit of evidence, as do the enclosures that came with it: samples of wallpaper. The wallpaper adds colour and depth to the black and white images of the room that were taken as crime scene photos. The photographs themselves are part of the evidence because this was the room where Brian laced his wife’s cup of tea with cyanide and she died.

It is my argument in my thesis that, rather than serving as an investigative tool as we might suspect from common modern representations of CSI (I'm thinking here of shows like Silent Witness where all the details of a crime scene are photographed and recorded, the 'clues' later zoomed-in-on, enhanced and explored), crime scene photographs at this time served more as a sort of surrogate for the space in court. A long history existed, prior to photography being used by police, of coroner’s inquests having an investigative purpose and taking place in the space in which someone was killed and/or a body was found. Following this tradition, the space of the courtroom hosted smaller representations of the space of the crime. Photographs and scale plans of the crime scene acted as aids to the jury’s imagination, allowing them to picture the space in which the narrative they were being presented with by prosecution or defence was situated (or both, since each might try to challenge the other’s narrative of what had taken place, depending on how the defence case was posited).

In the case of Moira's murder by Brian, the photographs and plan demonstrated how close Brian had been standing to his wife when she drank the cup of tea that killed her, making a nonsense of his claims that she had poisoned her own drink while his back was turned. Rather, the prosecution alleged, Brian had made the tea for his wife while she had nipped to the shop for some milk, and stood shaving at the dresser in the corner of the room as she drank it. With the photographs and plans supporting this latter narrative, Brian was found guilty of his wife’s murder at the Old Bailey and sentenced to death. An appeal failed, but he was granted mercy and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the Home Office.

In part two of this post I’ll be looking at two cases from the 1930s to explore one of the meanings of photographs in the cases of murder I've analysed: as signifiers of intimate relationships, and what this could mean for witnesses, defendants and victims.