A MOST UNLIKELY SUSPECT

In May 1922, a respected solicitor was sent to the gallows after being convicted of poisoning his wife. But was he truly guilty? A century on, Stephen Bates asks whether Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong was the victim of a terrible injustice

- STEPHEN BATES

One hundred years ago this May, a country solicitor from the little town of Hay-on-Wye, nestled on the border between England and Wales, was in prison awaiting execution for murdering his wife. Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong - he always insisted on the rank - had been convicted at a sensational 10-day trial of killing his wife Katharine 15 months earlier. It was said he had dosed her with arsenic that he had bought legally in the local chemist's shop, allegedly to kill the dandelions on the couple's lawn.

The case of Major Armstrong was so extraordinary that it seized not only the imagination of newspaper readers in Britain, but across North America and the rest of the English-speaking world. The twists and turns in the tale also inspired a new breed of crime novelists. It was, the Charlotte Observer in far-away North Carolina announced, citing the notorious medieval Italian dynasty: “The greatest poison drama of the century... All England is thrilled by the trial of a modern Borgia."

The story had everything, as it apparently involved far more than a private domestic tragedy, taking in petty professional rivalries and gossip; rumours that gave rise to astonishing speculation about a man who had been a pillar of the community. There were even tales of a poisoned box of chocolates and a deadly scone handed over at a tea party, allegedly with the words: “Scuse fingers."

A RESPECTABLE FIGURE