LITMIR.BIZ

      Mrs Proudlock would languish in Pudu gaol for almost six weeks before Kuala Lumpur next saw her. On 11 June she appeared in the Supreme Court where her trial opened before Mr Justice Sercombe Smith. Ethel was dressed in white and wore a hat whose veil concealed much of her face. According to the Mail, ‘she looked very pale as she took her place in the dock’. The public gallery was almost empty.

      It is a little ironic that Mrs Proudlock, an aspiring thespian, had recently appeared to good reviews in an amateur production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury, but would now enjoy no such privilege herself. Jury trials had been abolished in Malaya some years earlier, in large part because the pool of jurors, being confined to Britons – the only group thought capable of reaching judicious decisions – was necessarily small. Another reason for abolition had to do with a distrust of lawyers, most of whom were considered cynical and tendentious and all too likely to play on jurors’ emotions. Instead of trial by jury, Malaya employed the assessor system – later a source of much controversy. Under this arrangement, the defendant faced a triumvirate comprising a judge and two assistants. The judge interpreted the law, and the assistants, members of the public who in most cases had no legal training at all, assessed the evidence ‘in the cold light of reason’. And then all three voted, verdicts being determined by a simple majority.

      During the six weeks since Ethel had last been seen in public, rumours had been circulating that she and Steward were lovers. This was mere conjecture, Sercombe Smith reminded his assessors that first morning. Steward had attended the musical ‘at homes’ Will Proudlock liked to organize and, like many others, sometimes ran into the Proudlocks at the Selangor Club. This in no way proved, he said, that Steward and Mrs Proudlock had been intimately involved.

      Mrs Proudlock, Sercombe Smith went on, said she killed Steward in self-defence: ‘I was protecting my person as I am entitled to do.’ But had Steward really tried to rape her? That, too, had still to be proved, and the assessors’ decision in the matter would determine the case’s outcome.

      The first to take the stand was the defendant’s husband who told the court that his marriage was a happy one. Ethel ‘was always very attentive and affectionate’. She had been nineteen when he married her in 1907. Her health had been bad, he said, and they left for England within hours of the wedding. On the journey home, she was attended several times by the ship’s doctor. Since her return to KL in November 1908, her health had been poor. ‘She’s always been very nervous and easily frightened.’

      G. C. McGregor, one of Ethel’s doctors, then described her medical history in some detail – information which the Mail chose not to publish for reasons of propriety. (The details that follow were taken from a transcript of the trial sent to the Colonial Office.) Ethel had numerous problems, McGregor said: profuse leucorrhoea (an abnormal vaginal discharge), excessive and irregular menstruation, relaxed genitalia, a collapsed uterus and a tender ovary. There was more: the lips of her vulva were malformed, and her vagina contained large quantities of pus. McGregor had urged her to have an operation, but Mrs Proudlock, as he put it, ‘kept putting off the evil day’. Ethel, he finished, was a delicate girl who did not possess the strength of a normal person. When Steward confronted her, she became hysterical and had fired those shots, not to kill him, but to rid herself of an impending calamity.

      Dr Edward MacIntyre, an assistant surgeon assigned to KL’s General Hospital and the man who examined Mrs Proudlock on the night of the murder, was asked if her eyes looked dazed. ‘Dazed’ didn’t seem the right word, he said; as he remembered them, they looked intelligent. He did not get the impression that the accused had just experienced a severe mental shock.