Laurence Dowdall is a prosecution witness. He is in the witness hall, waiting to be called. In the court, through the wall, every single seat is taken. People are lined along the walls.
A mob gathers outside the court every day, sometimes a hundred, sometimes a thousand. For the entire three-week trial they stand in the rain, swapping morsels of information. The city has been terrorised by the frenzy of murders, families have been murdered in their beds, blameless teenage girls bludgeoned to death in fields and left lying in the rain and the snow.
Inside, the bustling court smells of sour sweat, cigarettes and damp overcoats.
There are two tiers of people watching. On the ground floor are the press benches, print journalists and reporters for the wireless. Such is the public interest that some newspapers have sent five or six journalists to cover various aspects of the trial. Any leftover seats downstairs are reserved for witnesses who have already given evidence and those awarded priority by the court: legal personnel with an interest, nabobs and notaries. Dotted among the journalists today are councilmen, identifiable by a sprig of seasonal flowers on their lapels. Glasgow Corporation gives them out to attendees at its meetings.
Manuel is in the dock right in front of these seats, separated by a low wooden wall. Journalists and lawyers are trusted not to physically attack him but the public are kept away, upstairs on the balcony.
There are sixty balcony seats, all taken by women, watching a court staffed entirely by men.
The women queue overnight, every night for three weeks. They start at six in the evening, settling down on the pavement with thin blankets on their knees, chunks of bread in their pockets to stave off hunger. The queue runs halfway up the Saltmarket. A beat policeman passes every few hours, monitoring them, checking all is well. He counts the people in the queue and warns anyone over the sixtieth person that they probably won’t get in. Might as well go home, dear. The papers print photographs of smiling gangs of chirpy gal-pals, toasting the reader with tea from flasks.
For the entire trial the viewing public have been almost exclusively women. No one knows why.
At first the newspapers speculate: are the women here for love? Manuel is handsome. Are they here for blood? The crimes are horrific. Is it because Manuel seems powerful to them? It is a proven scientific fact that women are attracted to power, to being dominated. It is 1958 and a husband has the legal right to rape and beat his wife. That’s a private matter, a matter for the home.
The journalists ask the women why they’re here. The women say they seek justice, they seek truth, they feel for the victims, hollow phrases that might well be lifted from the papers. But in the queue they don’t seem very serious or justice-seeking. They’re all excited and giggly.
As the brutal trial draws on the gendered pattern is so consistent and jarring that the newspapers stop struggling to make it chime with clichés about womanhood. The case says enough that is troubling.
At night, all night, another Glasgow is awake and breathing. This shadow city is full of dark, clever men climbing through suburban windows with guns in their hands, creeping around the homes of the law-abiding. They will hide in your attic for days. They will kill you and then make themselves a sandwich. They will drag young girls down railway embankments, chase them across dark fields, rip and rape them, leave them stuck on barbed wire, shoeless in snow, to bleed to death. They have guns and fancy social clubs in prestigious addresses. They drive an Avis Grey Lady, a car that costs the same as a modest house.
Whatever the queuing ladies are here for they are good-tempered. Friends have been made. Some have found celebrity.
Miss Helen McElroy is a regular in all of the newspapers. She is always first in the queue and is emphatic, if not eloquent, about her thirst for justice. Then, abruptly, on the eleventh night, she is missing. There is concern for her safety. She is elderly, wears thick glasses and lives in the Clyde Street Home, a model-lodging house in the Calton for homeless people. On the thirteenth evening she is back. Her absence is explained in a subheading–
MISS MCELROY TOLD…
‘IF YOU CAN QUEUE
YOU CAN WORK.’
Miss McElroy is interviewed once again. She is quite indignant: ‘Somehow,’ she says, ‘the Assistance have found out I was in the queue.’ But her determination to attend is undimmed. They will not stop her.
Young people are not admitted. A sixteen-year-old boy sleeps out on the first night only to be turned away at the door. The officer warns that the nature of the crimes is too unsettling for impressionable minds. Photographs will be shown. Fifty-nine waiting women appeal on the boy’s behalf but the officer has his orders and the boy is sent away. The women think it is a shame until they file into court and see all the evidence laid out on the productions table. Blood-sodden bedclothes, both of the guns, a mangled brassiere on a tray, the angle iron that was used to bludgeon the girl in East Kilbride. Then they’re glad the boy isn’t here to see this. After all the fun of a night on the pavement the reality of what they are about to witness stuns them dumb.
The court is crammed. The only empty seats are on the bench, next to Lord Cameron. As on the Elizabethan stage, there are VIP seats, looking out into the audience. These places are reserved for people so important that mingling in the general company would compromise their status. On the first day of the trial Myer Galpern, wearing his Chain of Office as Lord Provost of Glasgow, is seated next to Lord Cameron. He comes back for the first day of the defence case but leaves at lunch-time. He is not squeamish but, new in the post, is concerned about the seemliness of appearing either underemployed or too interested.
Dowdall is in the silent witness hall. Sturdy chairs line the walls. Water is provided for witnesses, as are cigarettes, matches and ashtrays. The court is just through the double doors but he can’t hear any of the proceedings. This is by design. The room is soundproofed so that waiting witnesses can’t hear one another’s evidence before they give their own.