The Drummond Affair E-Book

Stephanie Matthews

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 397

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'A serious reinvestigation full of revealing background information that sheds additional light on what was then and now remains a shocking crime' Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking 'This riveting, eye-opening investigation of a 70-year-old murder mystery reads like a whodunit ... A true crime must-read' Dean Jobb, author of The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream 'As much social history as it is gripping true crime' Jeremy Craddock, author of The Jigsaw Murders 'A meticulously researched re-examination' Caitlin Davies, author of Private Inquiries: The Secret History of Female Sleuths 1950s France. A British establishment figure. A shocking crime. A miscarriage of justice. The search for truth. In 1952, in a peaceful corner of Provence, a farmer's son stumbled upon a terrible scene. Three bodies: a husband and wife shot dead, their ten-year-old daughter savagely beaten to death. They were all British. So begins one of the most notorious murder cases in French history. Sir Jack Drummond was a senior advisor to the British government, a household name who was respected and admired. His fame made the case a cause celebre in France and resulted in the swift conviction of a local farmer, but questions about Drummond's life and death remain unanswered. In this bold new investigation, Stephanie Matthews and Daniel Smith strip away the prejudice and propaganda to reveal a grave miscarriage of justice. A light is shone on Drummond's secret life in the shadows of the Cold War, painting a portrait of an enigmatic man who may not have been the innocent holidaymaker he appeared to be, and recasting one of the twentieth century's most notorious murders in a fascinating and important new light.

Leseprobe

DEDICATIONS

Stephanie – For Tony, my partner in crime.

Dan – For Mum.

 

 

Published in the UK and USA in 2024 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-058-2

ebook: 978-183773-060-5

Text copyright © 2024 Stephanie Matthews and Daniel Smith

Authors have asserted their moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typesetting by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in the UK

CONTENTS

Preface: Tragedy in the Durance Valley

1 Recovering the Drummonds

2 Who was Jack Drummond?

3 The Investigation Begins

4 Wrong Place, Wrong Time?

5 Secrets and Spies

6 A Scientific Mind

7 The Englishman’s Food

8 Cometh the Hour

9 Cause Célèbre

10 The Dominicis

11 Trial

12 Doubts

13 A Web of Intrigues

14 More than Meets the Eye

15 Big Boots to Fill

16 Life and Death

17 The Gentleman Spy?

18 The Transatlantic Connection

19 Thank You from Washington

20 Innocent Tourists?

21 Cherchez l’homme

22 Afterword

Notes

Recommended Reading

Acknowledgements

PREFACE: TRAGEDY IN THE DURANCE VALLEY

On the morning of Friday 25 July 1952, Jack Drummond was packing up the family car – a new, dark green Hillman estate – parked up outside his Nottingham home. As he heaved the suitcases into the boot, his taste buds were already tingling at the thought of the cheese and wine he would soon be feasting upon. This was a trip for indulging his culinary passions. Elizabeth, his ten-year-old daughter, was bouncing with excitement at the prospect of the exotic adventure that lay ahead. Jack was a well-travelled man but even so, there was something special about a family holiday.

Until recently, a driving holiday to France would have been entirely unthinkable for most people. It was just seven years since the war had ended and only eight since France was liberated from Nazi occupation. The scars were still fresh, the rebuilding a work in progress. The spectre of fascism may have been vanquished from Europe but new battle lines had been drawn up, the inferno of the Second World War now replaced by the frost of the Cold War. But for those who could afford it, a bit of continental travel was now a possibility. This was the dawn of the package holiday age. Horizon had been the first company down this route, a couple of years previously in 1950 – an all-in-one trip to Corsica including flights. By 1952 the same company was offering all-inclusives to Palma. But the Drummonds had other plans. They were going to travel under their own steam. A ferry across the Channel and then the long drive down to the French Riviera.

French sun and glamour were just what Jack and his wife Anne needed. She was younger than him by some sixteen years. She was smart too, a civil servant by profession but these days, to the world at large, a housewife. The couple had met through work and all in all they rubbed along well, but there had been a big argument the previous night. Hopefully things would calm down once they were on the road.

They were keen to give Elizabeth a real treat too. There weren’t many kids in Nottingham going on a fancy holiday like this, but then again Jack Drummond wasn’t an average sort of dad. He had made something of himself. People knew who he was. As a scientist who had provided crucial advice to the government in arguably the nation’s greatest moment of crisis, his work had impacted the lives of pretty much everyone in the country. He might have been ‘Daddy’ to Elizabeth, but to the wider public he was Sir Jack Drummond. So, the South of France it was.

As she watched the luggage piling up in the Hillman, Elizabeth mulled over the plans she had for the trip. There would be the sun-kissed beaches to play upon, new foods to try, not to mention hours on the road to kill. Their ultimate destination was Villefranche, an attractive port town between Nice and Monaco. The intention was to meet up with an old friend and colleague of Jack’s, Guy Marrian, along with his wife and two daughters.

The adventure began at a leisurely pace. Their car, although modern by 1952 standards, had a top speed of only 40 miles per hour or so. The Drummonds did not arrive in Dunkirk until Monday 28 July. Then the odyssey began in earnest. Not that it would be high living all the way. British tourists could take no more than £25 out of the country – a little over £600 in today’s money – so they would need to make it last. Wandering through the countryside of eastern France en route to the Riviera, they were on the road for five days in all, passing through a mixture of grand old cities, like Reims, and smaller towns. The roads themselves frequently showed the evidence of their wartime bombardment, ensuring that passenger comfort was in short supply.

But that is not to say that the sense of adventure was in any way diminished. Elizabeth persuaded her parents to make a detour to Domrémy, the birthplace of Joan of Arc. There she wrote a postcard and mailed it to her teacher back in Nottingham. They stopped in Digne too, a small town close to the Alps. During the war, it had been a focal point of the Resistance movement and suffered both Italian and German occupation. The Drummonds parked up for the night and stayed at the Grand Hôtel. While having lunch there, Elizabeth spotted a poster for a bullfight and asked that they return to see it later in the week. Or so the Marrians, their hosts at Villefranche, would later claim.

Finally, on 2 August, the family arrived at Villefranche, where they dined with the Marrians and wallowed in the midsummer heat. But they were back on the road again on the 4th, taking the N85 – the Route Napoleon – back to Digne to watch the matadors in action. This road had formed part of the route taken by troops after the Allied landings on the beaches of the Côte d’Azur in 1944 and was still badly damaged. They set out early, at around six in the morning, although the bullfighting was not until four. Still, more time to take in the sights along the way.

That evening was hot and sultry in Provence. For reasons unknown, the Drummonds did not take the Route Napoleon on the return journey. Instead, they opted for the route nationale N96, which follows the valley of the River Durance. As the night drew in, they parked the Hillman on a stretch of dusty roadside near a mulberry tree. A signpost pointed in the direction of Lurs, a little village that nestled on the plateau above.

The banks of the Durance were no more than a hundred metres away. Just up the road stood an old farmhouse. Its name was La Grand Terre, but if it was ever grand, those days were long past. The peasant farming family who lived there, the Dominicis, had allowed it to become rather ramshackle. The head of the household, Gaston, was no spring chicken. He’d turned 75 on his last birthday. He shared the house with his wife Marie, his son Gustave, Gustave’s wife Yvette, and their baby son Alain.

As night drew in, Elizabeth stretched out across the Hillman’s back seats, while her parents slept under the stars on camp beds by the side of the car. When the sun came up, they would pile back in and get on the road again. A new day for new adventures and more memories to make. But at around 1 a.m. the silence around La Grand Terre was shattered. Several of the Dominicis were awoken by the noise. There was a succession of sharp cracks and what sounded like screaming. The inhabitants seemingly convinced themselves it was likely just a poacher. They did not bother to investigate.

A few hours later, according to witness testimony, Gaston was first to rise in the household, going out at four to take his goats to pasture, up a path that led in the opposite direction from the Drummonds’ car. Gustave was next up, about an hour later, going to inspect some land damage that needed attention. Some overenthusiastic watering of the family’s crops had caused a mini-landslide that threatened to halt the local trains. If that happened, the Dominicis would face a fine.

As he made his way to inspect the problem, so it would be reported, he stumbled upon a scene that chilled his blood. He spotted Jack Drummond first, lying prone at the roadside across from the parked car, one of the camp beds covering him. Then he saw Anne, lying next to the car. Both, he realised with rising dread, were dead. They had been shot. But there was worse to come. Some seventy or eighty metres away, on a track that led to a railway bridge in the direction of the river, was the body of poor Elizabeth. Had she tried to outrun whomever had attacked her parents? She had not been shot like her mum and dad. Her attacker (or attackers) had seemingly run out of bullets. So instead, her assailant had caught up with her and beaten her with the butt of a rifle until her skull fractured.

So, a tragedy began to unfold under the dawn sun of a beautiful Provence morning. A holiday adventure turned to horror. Innocents abroad slaughtered in paradise. Within the hour, the local police had been summoned and the area around La Grand Terre marked out as a crime scene. It was the beginning of a saga that would sear itself into the French psyche, the first bumbling steps in an affair that would become among the most notorious in French judicial history: l’affaire Dominici.

RECOVERING THE DRUMMONDS

1

The journey down to the south of France that took the Drummonds several days in that summer of 1952 can be done today in closer to ten hours. Modern autoroutes and more efficient cars have vastly reduced the time – or, at least, that is the case for most of the year. Not, though, at the beginning of August when the roads are jam-packed with Parisians, Dutch and Germans all heading in that direction for the traditional month-long break. The traffic jams then – aptly called bouchons (corks) by the French – can stretch for miles, providing plenty of time for those so inclined to contemplate the Drummonds’ terrible end and wonder at what secrets lie in the beautiful and rugged countryside of Provence even now, yet come to light almost three-quarters of a century later?

There are still a few pilgrims who go to visit the graves of the victims. The funerals for all three were conducted two days after their bodies were discovered. They had been taken some 10 km away to the local hospital in Forcalquier, a small town of less than 3,000 people that had been Provence’s capital in medieval times. After the post-mortems were complete, the bodies rested in the hospital chapel until a Protestant priest was located to conduct the service. The chapel was tiny, only just big enough for a few mourners. Jack’s godson and a couple of his colleagues from Nottingham were able to make the trip. The Marrians, the friends the Drummonds had met in Villefranche, were also there, as was the Consul General from Marseilles.

Jack, Anne and Elizabeth made their final journey together by horse-drawn hearse to Forcalquier’s beautiful yew-lined cemetery with spectacular hillside views of the Provençal landscape. It was another stiflingly hot day. The locals followed the cortege in their Sunday best, accompanied by holidaymakers in bright summer attire. The outrage at the crime was still raw and many locals were in tears. Flowers were piled outside the chapel and strewn along the route by local children. Then the three simple plain oak coffins, each adorned with a wreath (‘To Elizabeth from Grannie’ read the one for the little girl, touching in its simplicity), were lowered into the ground. Elizabeth lay in between her parents. Some peace for the child, it is to be hoped, after the appalling tumult. But there is something not quite right about the scene. A detail out of place that points to the chaotic circumstances that have seen them laid to rest here. The family name on each of the headstones has been misspelt. Just the one ‘m’ where there should be two: ‘Drumond’.

There are remnants of the tragedy on the road where it occurred too. The mulberry tree near the site of the killings is still there and you can see the pockmarks on a stone wall where some of the bullets ricocheted. At the spot where Elizabeth fell is a homemade wooden shrine, well tended to this day, adorned with ribbons and surrounded by teddy bears. Totems of the violence and innocence that collided here. But in France, those who still remember the crimes do not speak of the Drummond murders. To them, they are routinely l’affaire Dominici. To those of us looking back on the events from a historical distance, this is troubling. It is too often that the names of victims are treated as secondary to those of the perpetrators of monstrous crimes. It is why almost everyone has heard of Jack the Ripper but only a few of us could name any of his victims. But in the case of l’affaire Dominici, the erasure of the victims is even stranger. Jack the Ripper’s victims were not public figures, unlike Jack Drummond. Sir Jack Drummond, let us not forget. His was a name that was known up and down the land. Yet at the moment of his slaughter and that of his family, his famous name was superseded by that of another. If Jack’s relegation is puzzling, even more outrageous is the sexist manner in which Anne has been shoved into the shadows of history. Why is it that so few people in Britain have any inkling of who this family were? It is rare to find even senior academics in Jack’s own discipline of biochemistry who have come across him.

L’affaire Dominici was a painful episode for France, and one of the most contested cases in the nation’s history. Yet in Britain, it has all but faded from memory. The seemingly inexplicable and savage massacre of the family of one of the country’s most esteemed scientific figures ought to have been a touchstone event. The Drummond murders should be one of those shared cultural reference points that everyone knows about, at least vaguely.

In France, there have been numerous books about the events,1 along with major films2 and hit TV shows.3 But there has been nothing comparable in the homeland of the victims. Even at the time, there were far fewer serious obituaries of Drummond than might have been expected. Today, his groundbreaking work – for which Anne deserves vastly more credit – is hardly known by those who don’t have a specific academic interest in it.4 So, what has prompted this collective case of amnesia?

Is it possible that the death of Jack and his family was nothing so much as a great big inconvenience for certain parties? A source of potential embarrassment or discomfort? Was Jack perhaps not all that he appeared – or perhaps he was all he appeared, and more besides? Well known for his public health work, was he also involved in other work that was rather less well known about?

In part, this book aims to rebalance history. Jack Drummond is a forgotten hero. The story of him and his family has been hijacked. The mystery of their murders holds a compulsive fascination, but it is only one aspect of their tale. And even when it comes to their deaths, they have been rendered as little more than extras, incidental victims in a French melodrama. Ever since that hot summer night in 1952, the truth of what happened along the route nationale N96 has remained elusive and fiercely debated. It seems that our best chance of uncovering the answers lies as much in understanding the victims as in studying the apparent perpetrators.

The mystery of the Drummonds’ deaths quickly turned into a French saga of bumbling gendarmes, class conflict and a judicial system under scrutiny. In short order, interest in the Drummonds was replaced by a focus on the perceived botched police inquiry and the possibility of a gross perversion of justice. These are, it is true, all elements of the story but they came to dominate and ultimately obfuscate the truth.

An unhelpful legend grew up around the bizarre theatre of the killings. Where sober minds were required to look outwards for the truth, instead they turned inwards. The case became a conduit for French introspection. With each new newspaper editorial, book, documentary and film (the vast majority originating in France), the truth receded. The evidence suggests that while a beautiful corner of France was the setting for the drama, its nature was much more international in scope.

When the news of the murders hit the British press late on 5 August 1952,5 Jack Drummond was a well-known name, someone who had saved the lives of innumerable individuals. As such, there was an immediate outcry both loud and sincere. The horror of the crime was compounded because of the fate of young, innocent Elizabeth. It was headline news for two days. But soon the clamour subsided. The process of forgetting began. The story was supplanted on the front pages by the arrest of two Royal Navy sailors accused of stealing a taxi in Tokyo, and so causing a deterioration of relations with Japan. The Drummond case, commonly illustrated with affecting photographs of little Elizabeth, was consigned to the inside pages for a few more days, and then … a curious quiet. There was sporadic coverage when the case took on its many unexpected twists, but not the intense focus one might have expected.

With all this in mind, we hope this book will go some way to transforming l’affaire Dominici into ‘The Drummond Affair’. Not just a titular change but a fundamental re-slanting of the entire narrative. This story is part murder-mystery but it is biography too. It is high time that Jack Drummond is resurrected from the fate he has suffered as a footnote in others’ histories. His life, remarkable in so many respects long before it was cruelly cut short, is worthy of a biography regardless of the manner of his death. His wife, Anne, was a woman of note too, and the extent of her contribution to her husband’s groundbreaking work is ripe for reappraisal. The more their story is studied, the more vividly they emerge – not as poor victims of a seemingly random act of brutality but as living, breathing individuals leading authentic lives of adventure and achievement. People who left a positive mark on the world in an era marked out by conflict and destruction.

Piecing together the evidence from contemporary accounts, personal memoirs and official documents, we have come to realise that the solution to the question of what befell the Drummonds in Provence almost certainly lies in better understanding who they were as people. It is a quest for truth that has taken us down some unexpected paths and thrown up more than a few surprises along the way. At times, it has been spine-tingling – like when a handwritten note jumps out from the margins of a letter stamped ‘Top Secret’. A few scrawled words here and there that point in the right direction far more effectively than reams of carefully crafted official documents.

By returning the focus to Jack and Anne (and, of course, to Elizabeth, who was not granted the time to make her mark on the world but who surely would have done so, as her parents had before her), we hope this book will go some way to restoring the Drummond name. Jack’s achievements, many in partnership with Anne, are deserving of a recognition that has been denied them for too long. But nor is this a work of hagiography. The Drummonds were not saints. They were fully rounded human beings. They did much good for the world, but there are areas of their lives that are shrouded in shade. While it is not possible to drown that shade with light, we have sufficient clues to at least illuminate some of its recesses. In this process of recovering the victims as real human beings, we may even find ourselves several steps further towards discerning the truth behind their deaths that has lain hidden for so many years.

WHO WAS JACK DRUMMOND?

2

On 27 December 1952, a letter appeared in the esteemed scientific journal Nature.1 It was signed by five senior Canadian academics. Their reason for writing to arguably the world’s most prestigious multidisciplinary scientific publication was to remember Jack Drummond.

‘The news of the tragic death of Sir Jack Drummond came as a severe shock to his many friends in America,’ it began:

Only after the initial paralysing numbness associated with the sporadic news flashes of his murder had worn off could the enormity of this crime be appreciated. Although the loss to the scientific world has been great, a deep feeling of the personal loss of a friend has been experienced by many of us in Canada. Over the years Jack Drummond has made numerous Canadians his associates. His interest and hospitality was extended to many junior men of science, and all of us will remember the impact of his personality as he blended the science of nutrition and the art of entertainment into a formula as palatable as his Englishman’s Food. Perhaps no one has done so much to help so many Canadian medical research students attain a balanced perspective of scientific life in England. To many of us the pleasure of informal evenings, and the charm of Drummond as a host, will remain as our most vivid memory of a man who was truly more than a great man of science.

It is quite the eulogy. Proof, if it were needed, that the victim who died such a violent death on a French roadside was by no means run of the mill. Not only ‘a great man of science’, but a decent and engaging fellow whose influence straddled oceans and continents. It was as a biochemist and nutritionist that Jack found fame, especially as one of the chief architects of the British rationing system during the Second World War. But such were his abilities that many other countries would benefit from his expertise. In a world where epidemics of hunger and malnutrition threatened under the particular circumstances of war, it is impossible to say just how many lives Jack helped save, and how many more he rescued from the deformities of malnutrition, but it must be counted in at least thousands and it is almost certainly not an exaggeration to talk in the realms of millions. A claim very few have ever been able to make.

Jack was born on 12 January 1891. Queen Victoria was in the 57th year of her reign. A new magazine called the Strand was about to publish the first short story featuring a detective called Sherlock Holmes. Meanwhile, Oscar Wilde was applying his final edits to The Picture of Dorian Gray and Thomas Hardy was readying himself to publish Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Notable people doing great things. Yet there were not many obvious signs that Jack was destined for such greatness. As we will see, the exact details of his birth and early years are uncertain and even his birth certificate bears a different name. Some obituaries say he was born in Leicester, others in south London. What is certain is that he was not raised by his mother, but by an aunt and her husband, and the man identified as his father was, in fact, not.

If Jack wasn’t particularly blessed by advantageous circumstances in his earliest years, it was not long before it was apparent that he boasted a first-rate scientific mind. This would be the key to his success. In 1912, he took a first-class degree in chemistry from East London College (which would evolve into Queen Mary University of London). He then held a series of research posts, first at King’s College London and then, from 1914, at the Cancer Hospital Research Institute. He assisted Casimir Funk, who was then emerging as a pioneer in the nascent field of vitamins.2 It was Funk, in fact, who minted the word ‘vitamine’, as a shortened form of ‘vital amine’ (an amine being a particular type of organic compound), and Jack who would subsequently remove the ‘e’ to call them vitamins. Jack was entranced by his mentor’s work, which set him on the path of a specialism in nutrition.

While his contemporaries were making their way to the battlefields of the First World War, many never to return, Jack stayed in London. He was seemingly prevented from signing up by a medical condition, although – as with so much in his life – the precise details are elusive. But he was certainly gainfully employed at this time, a key member of the skeleton staff who kept the research work of the Cancer Hospital going during those years. In July 1915, he became a husband too, marrying Mabel Straw, a fellow undergraduate at East London College.

In 1917, Jack went to work with one of his old bosses from King’s, William Dobinson Halliburton, and a year later published a paper on infant nutrition in the Lancet,3 the leading journal of general medical practice. Still only in his mid-twenties, it was clear Jack’s star was in the ascendancy. The following year, he received his doctorate and was appointed Funk’s successor as physiological chemist at the Cancer Hospital. Then University College London (UCL) poached him and in 1922, aged just 31, he was named as its first chair of biochemistry, an appointment funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

From there it was onwards and upwards, carrying out world-leading work into vitamins and their nutritional value. Not least, he was the first to isolate almost pure vitamin A and vitamin E,4 but did not get the kudos for this. It all ensured that he was a well-established name in the scientific firmament before the onset of the Second World War provided him with the opportunity for his most high-profile work.

In 1939, as war loomed, Jack published The Englishman’s Food,5 an academic but nonetheless accessible historical survey of the eating habits of the English people over some half a millennium. In preparing the book, he worked closely with Anne Wilbraham, who in their subsequent obituaries was described as his secretary but who in fact held an important position in the civil service and whose contribution, it is safe to say, amounted to more than typing up his notes. The two were lovers, and when Jack and Mabel divorced after 24 years together, Anne Wilbraham became the second Mrs Drummond in 1940. Two years later they would toast the arrival of a baby girl, Elizabeth.

The Englishman’s Food was in part an attempt by Jack to get to grips with the nation’s nutrition in a highly practical way. It was timely, too. With Britain about to fling itself into a headlong conflict in Europe and beyond, there were undoubtedly going to be stresses on the food supply chain. The First World War had shown very clearly how conflict impacted domestic food production and international trade concurrently. If he wasn’t already, Drummond soon found himself on the government’s radar.

At the outbreak of hostilities in September 1939, the Ministry of Food called on his expertise with regard to the risks of gas contamination of food.6 This, together with his submission of a memorandum explaining the needs and risks facing Britain as it strived to feed itself,7 made such an impression that in February 1940 he became the Ministry’s scientific advisor.

If the early months of the conflict were ‘the Phoney War’, it all soon took on a grim immediacy, not least for Jack. In May 1940, Winston Churchill’s accession to 10 Downing Street in place of Neville Chamberlain saw the arrival of the dynamic Lord Woolton at the Ministry of Food. He promptly set Jack to work on a food acquisition plan that was practical and rooted in sound nutritional principles. In other words, Jack was about to design the rationing system that would ensure Britain did not starve over the coming years. It was, perhaps, the crowning triumph of his career. Where others may have been cowed by the size of the task, Jack embraced it. Instead of seeing an insurmountable hurdle, he sensed an opportunity. A chance to address the serial inadequacies of the British diet.

Plundering the knowledge gained from his decades of lab research and his grasp of the eating habits that he had so recently written about, he built a system that saw the population emerge from the war nutritionally better off than when it had started. He made sure that the most vulnerable were at the centre of consideration – the young and the old, the weak and the sick, the working classes, and expectant and nursing mothers. The poorest parts of the population found themselves consuming more protein and vitamins than ever before, while the better off were guided away from those culinary excesses that were slowly killing them.

The magnitude of Jack’s achievement did not go unnoticed, and there were accolades aplenty, including a knighthood in 1944. Arguably an even greater honour came in 1947 when a ‘Lasker Group Award’ was bestowed by the American Public Health Association on the British Ministries of Food and Health. Established in 1945 and administered by the Lasker Foundation, the Lasker Prize is awarded annually to those deemed to have made major contributions to medical science or carried out extraordinary public service in the medical field. It stands perhaps second only to the Nobel Prize. The prize was given to the two ministries for what was described as ‘the unprecedented program of food distribution in Great Britain, with resulting improvement in the health of the people’. The citation continued:

… Although almost all other environmental factors which might influence the public health deteriorated under the stress of war, the public health in Great Britain was maintained and in many respects improved. The rates of infantile, neo-natal and maternal mortality and stillbirths all reached the lowest levels in the history of the country. The incidence of anaemia and dental caries declined, the rate of growth of schoolchildren improved, progress was made in the control of tuberculosis, and the general state of nutrition of the population as a whole was up to or an improvement upon pre-war standards.

… In the opinion of the Lasker Awards Committee, this has been one of the greatest demonstrations in public health administration that the world has ever seen. The Lasker Awards Committee of the American Public Health Association therefore takes great satisfaction in recommending awards for scientific and administrative achievement to the British Ministries of Food and Health and to the four great leaders in this historic enterprise, Lord Woolton, Sir Jack Drummond, Sir Wilson Jameson and Sir John Boyd Orr.

Jack’s efforts had come to the attention of the international community some years earlier, and his expertise was called upon across hot spots in Europe throughout the war. He was also a regular commuter to the US, advising on the intricacies of the food transports undertaken as part of the Lend-Lease deal with Washington, and in 1943 was a delegate at the creation of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation, charged with improving the world’s nutrition levels. As the end of the war came into sight from 1944, he assumed various new consulting positions to prepare Europe for the food challenges ahead, both immediate and longer-term. In May 1945, he undertook particularly arduous work in the recently occupied and famine-stricken Netherlands, as well as making a mercy dash to the just-liberated Belsen concentration camp.

In the immediate post-war period, Jack took a career change of direction that wrong-footed many of his colleagues. In 1945, he resigned his position as Professor of Biochemistry at UCL to become Director of Research at Boots Pure Drug Company. Once his posting with the Ministry of Food ran its course the following year, he transplanted his family to Nottingham, home of Boots, and threw himself into his new role with typical gusto. Leveraging his unrivalled reputation, he set about bridging the gap between the often dislocated worlds of academic and commercial research.

It was a task he was still diligently involved in right up until his final moments. He died a man of multiple and formidable achievements. A skilled and wise scientific researcher. The first Professor of Biochemistry at one of the world’s great academic institutions. The saviour of the health of the British people in wartime. A courageous and compassionate helper of those in direst need behind enemy lines. A knight of the realm.

Which makes the mystery of why we have forgotten Jack Drummond and the slaughter of his family all the more perplexing.

THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS

3

It was a little after six in the morning on 5 August 1952 that Gustave Dominici, the grown-up son who lived with his family at La Grand Terre, reared up from the side of the road close to where the body of Jack Drummond lay. He flagged down a passing motorcycle ridden by a stranger, Jean-Marie Olivier, who was on his way home from a night shift at the local chemical factory in nearby St Auban. The motorbike was in fact not the first vehicle Gustave had spotted on the road. A moment or two earlier he had let a car with Swiss plates go past. Perhaps he had assumed its inhabitants would lack the local knowledge necessary in the circumstances.

Regardless, M. Olivier braked heavily to a stop and Gustave breathlessly raced over to him. He told the motorcyclist that he had found a body on the slope by the edge of the road and asked him to go and inform the gendarmes at Oraison, some five miles away. Olivier, his heart racing, revved up his engine and rode directly to the station, where an officer immediately passed on the intelligence to Captain Henri Albert at the larger Forcalquier station.

By the time the police contingent from Forcalquier arrived at 7.15 a.m., a small crowd had already passed through or near to the crime scene. Among them was a railway worker, Faustin Roure, who had come to inspect the damage caused by the landslide that Gustave had reported the night before and was known to the Dominicis. Gustave’s brother, Clovis, and Clovis’s brother-in-law, Marcel Boyer, also arrived on push bikes on their way to work at the train station at Lurs. It was apparent that word had quickly spread about the spectacle at the roadside by La Grand Terre.

But when Sgt Louis Romanet and Gendarme Raymond Bouchier turned up in their motorcycle and sidecar, all was temporarily quiet. Only as they neared the Drummonds’ Hillman did Gustave approach them from behind and lead them to the victims. The police did not, as one might have expected, fence off any of the crime scene, nor did they have the necessary equipment – that is to say, a roll or two of tape – to do so. That they needed to protect the physical evidence at the earliest opportunity does not even seem to have occurred to them.

The grisly nature of the scene threw them. Expecting to find a run-of-the-mill local road accident and instead stumbling upon a British-registered car, three dead people and a notebook containing the name and address of one Sir Jack Drummond persuaded them that this was a serious crime involving foreign dignitaries and was far beyond their remit. It was time to pass this up the line of command. While Bouchier shot some photos of the scene, Romanet rushed to the village of Lurs, some four kilometres away up a very steep road, where he found a telephone and informed Captain Albert that they were dealing with a massacre. Albert escalated matters further up the chain of command, notifying his superior, Commandant Bernier, in Digne and also the judicial police in Nice. Before long, the British Consulate at Marseilles was put in the picture too.

Albert now jumped in his standard-issue Peugeot and headed for La Grand Terre, with Bernier arriving sometime around eight o’clock. Yet still neither man, in spite of their wealth of experience, addressed the issue of cordoning off the area. The focus was less on preservation of evidence and more on informal interviews with potential witnesses in the hopes of honing in on a suspect and establishing motive. All the while, the scene grew increasingly chaotic, trampled by any number of passers-by and whoever fancied playing amateur detective. A colony of journalists was already starting to amass. Fifty by the end of the day, expanding to over eighty in the days to come. Proof, if it were needed, that this was not just any old crime.

Captain Albert was keen to get eyes on the ground with relatively free rein. He knew he had limited time to flex his detective muscles before bigger guns than him arrived. Soon the Drummond killings would serve as the backdrop for the latest bout in the perennial battle between the gendarmes (essentially local police affiliated with the armed forces) and the judicial police, a civilian body with responsibility for policing major urban areas and taking over other serious and complex investigations too.

But even as the clock was ticking, Albert had the luxury of a little more time than usual. Being the middle of summer, the judicial police were particularly busy, what with the influx of tourists creating extra work on the Riviera on top of the usual levels of localised criminality, not to mention officers taking time off for vacations of their own. The Nice police were utterly overwhelmed so opted to pass the case over to their counterparts in Marseilles. Albert knew it would likely take several hours for the crime to be registered, a suitably senior officer assigned, and for that officer to make the not insignificant journey to La Grand Terre. In the event, it was not until after 9 a.m. that news of the slaughter even made it to the station in Marseille.

Nonetheless, Albert would soon have other interested company at the murder site in the shape of three officers from the court in Digne, who turned up together at about 9.30. This trio represented yet another layer of technocratic complication. The law in France required that where there is a murder, the investigation be initiated by a public prosecutor (an employee of the state), who then hands it to a prosecuting magistrate (in theory, an independent, non-political appointment), who then oversees the conduct of the case. In practice, this meant the magistrate had the authority to guide the investigation of the judicial police, deciding which witnesses may be interrogated and when, as well as providing oversight of medical and other experts. In the end, it was also the prosecuting magistrate’s duty to decide whether there was sufficient evidence to indict a defendant and enter a case into the court system. The prosecuting magistrate was thus a hybrid of police officer and judge. As might be expected, the relationship between the prosecuting magistrate, the public prosecutor and the police (both gendarmes and judicial police) did not always run smoothly.

Albert must have valued the golden hour-and-a-half he had before any of his potential professional rivals appeared. But how his heart must have sunk a little with the arrival of Deputy Public Prosecutor Louis Sabatier, Examining Magistrate Roger Périès, and Clerk of the Court Émile Barras – all officials of the court in Digne – in their regulation Peugeot. By then, some other significant new arrivals were already in situ. The Mayor of Lurs had turned up with a local country doctor by the name of Henri Dragon.

There is nothing to suggest that Dr Dragon was anything other than highly competent in the day-to-day business of looking after the poorly and ailing. But he was utterly inexperienced when it came to making a forensic study of the scattered victims of a murder. Despite giving what might most charitably be described as a superficial examination of the victims, he nonetheless managed to sully the crime scene yet further. Most crucially, he turned the Drummonds’ bodies over in the course of making his rudimentary assessment, as well as moving other items of evidence. Exactly how he manipulated the bodies was not properly documented, so those that followed could not be sure that the scene before them truly resembled the state in which the bodies were discovered.

While so compromising the integrity of the scene, Dr Dragon failed to make anything in the way of an incisive evaluation. On the contrary, he brought only further confusion and doubt. There was, for example, no precise description of the wounds each victim had suffered, which surely must have been the least expected of him. In the case of Elizabeth, he noticed that her bare feet showed no signs of abrasion. A later police report would contradict this, suggesting that there were multiple signs of minor injury. This question was important, because if Dr Dragon was to be believed, Elizabeth was likely killed and then moved across the rough track that ran to the water’s edge. But if the later report was correct, then Elizabeth may well have been fleeing when she was caught and beaten to death. Uncertainty was already overwhelming the crime scene as a result of avoidable failings in procedure.

In only one direction did the doctor seem to shed any real light. Having made his examination of the Drummonds, he went to the farmhouse of the Dominicis to ask for some water to wash his hands. He was greeted, if that is the word, by Gaston Dominici, who seemed in a state of shock. The two were old friends, yet Dominici was adamant that the doctor should not come indoors but instead use the outdoor pump to wash his hands. When the doctor made to fill a basin, the old farmer prevented him, saying the smell of the blood would put his horses off ever drinking from it again. Dominici seemed determined to prevent the doctor from coming into his home at any cost. It was hardly the kind of compassionate cooperation one might have expected given the circumstances. But the incident did add to the fast-growing sense that the inhabitants of the farmhouse were not your typical helpful neighbours. Moreover, in time it would prompt some to ask what was in the house that morning that Dominici didn’t want the doctor to see.

Later, at about ten o’clock, a sniffer dog arrived, a champion German shepherd from Digne. Accompanied by her handler, the hound proved almost as ineffectual as Dr Dragon, sniffing about the place without turning up any clues of note. She did not seem especially interested in the Dominicis, nor did she pursue any noticeable trails. Albert must have had the gnawing suspicion that his part of the investigation was getting nowhere at a canter.

Over in Marseille, where the chief inspector was on holiday and a skeleton staff was unprepared for such an involved crime as this, the case was assigned to Commissioner Edmond Sébeille. He was at the time finishing up another murder case and was looking forward to a well-earned holiday with his wife and daughter in the coming days. An early assessment by the gendarmerie in Forcalquier suggested that the killings might be the result of a robbery gone wrong. Sébeille voiced to a colleague his gut feeling that this one would be a tough nut to crack. But as the son of a celebrated detective and himself a member of the Marseille police’s elite mobile ‘Tiger Brigade’, Les Brigades du Tigre, he could not pass up the chance to prove his mettle in what was already shaping up to be a sensational case. Known by some as the ‘Maigret of Marseilles’, Sébeille readied himself.

He was in one of two ancient black Citroën cars that eventually left Marseilles at 2.30 p.m., arriving at the scene some 130 km away at about 5.30 p.m. It was not an auspicious start. The bodies had already been removed. Sébeille failed to greet Albert and assumed something of a superior air, underscoring the natural rivalry between the two branches of the police. Albert was particularly unimpressed, as government directives meant that the gendarmerie had been severely hampered in what they could do in the absence of supervision from the judicial police. While he had been pleased to have a head start, for most of the day he had been hamstrung. In effect, eight or more daylight hours had been lost, during which time crucial clues went undiscovered or were severely jeopardised. Already the odds of identifying and convicting the perpetrator were greatly diminishing.

It was not all bad news, though. Before long, various ammunition was recovered and then the apparent murder weapon was found where it had been thrown into the river. It was an old American-issue Rock Ola M1 carbine rifle and bore a metal plate inscribed ‘RMC’. For a while, it was speculated that these might be the initials of the murderer himself. But in due course, it was established that the firearm originated at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario in Canada.

Such weapons were in plentiful supply in the area. It was almost certainly a leftover from the arming of the Maquis (the wartime French Resistance), whose network had been centred on the nearby Ganagobie plateau, where Allied troops had passed through in 1944 on their way to liberating Paris. Such weapons were illegal to own after the war but in an area where hunting wild boar was both necessary for food and beloved as a sport, this law was largely ignored. And now one of these rifles had been used for the most gruesome ends. But Sébeille was heartened by its discovery. Certain that the murderer was a local, he confidently told a contingent of the press that the ‘weapon will talk’ and implied it would not be long before it yielded the killer. That, however, proved to be an ambitious prognosis.

Rather, the investigation became bogged down in confusion and malaise. Even such basics as when vital pieces of evidence were retrieved and by whom saw frequent disagreement between officers. Perhaps most markedly, there were wildly at-odds stories concerning the discovery of a large splinter of wood that had become dislocated from the butt of the murder weapon during the attack. Moreover, after Dr Dragon’s contribution, two other inexperienced doctors were given the job of conducting the autopsies. Neither consulted with Dr Dragon before they did so, nor did they think to document their procedures with photographs. The result was a collection of reports containing numerous disparities and contradictions.