Almanac Books: An Edwardian cricket murder, investigation by Gideon Haigh

 

 

 

 

 

At the start of last year, I was rereading a favourite old book, Cyril Pearl’s Morrison of Peking, when a throwaway line caught my eye.  It concerned a 1919 letter to G. E. Morrison from his masseur Arthur Robertson: ‘Mr Robertson, who was a great gossip, told Morrison that G. F. Vernon, one of the Ivo Bligh team of cricketers, had a son, a man of violent temper, who in a fit of jealousy had murdered a white companion on a Queensland station, smashing his head with a cricket bat.’

 

How had I missed this previously?  Why didn’t I know about it?  I tucked it away in that recess of my brain concerned with ‘Stuff That Needs to Be Checked Out.’  When I reopened that recess during lockdown last year, I decided to do so.

 

Yes, it was true.  On the night of 23 September 1910, a caretaker, John Neil, was murdered.  The finger of suspicion pointed to a twenty-four-year-old English jackeroo, George Vernon, the son of one of England’s most famous amateur cricketers, G. F. Vernon, who had married into an Australian rural dynasty.  The trial became Queensland’s longest and most sensational, for Vernon did harbour a secret – just not a secret anyone suspected.  And the crime had a shocking sequel.

 

So what are you going to do about that?  You’re going to write a book and publish it yourself, yeah?  So I did.  Between lockdowns, I even got to Queensland State Archives, a vast repository in Runcorn designed on the lines of Kafka’s The Castle, there being no obvious door.

 

The title, although it sounds like Cormac McCarthy, is a line from an affidavit by a half-caste stable boy on the station – the case hinged on the possibility of identification under a moon’s pale light.  The story blends sport and law with the attitudes of colonialism and the decadence of the leisure classes – what was the empire to do with its vagrant sons?  The tabloid media plays a part also, especially that glorious reprobate Horatio Bottomley MP.

 

Anyway, it’s the first publication of the Archives Liberation Front, which successfully rallied the resistance to the desecration of Australia’s archives last year.  It’s the smartest little hardback you’ve ever seen, exquisitely illustrated, elegantly designed, with a colophon designed by my daughter, and it’s taken an age to come from the printer in China (supply chain bla bla).

 

So if you send me your address – I’m [email protected] – it’s yours for $45 including p & p.  My bank details: BSB 733152, acct no 525322.  I’ll even sign it.  In fact, I’ll sign it unless you ask me not to.

 

Numbers are strictly limited.  Book now to avoid disappointment.  All that stuff, you have to say it, like ‘all good booksellers’, as though to distinguish them from bad ones.  Although in this case I’m the only bookseller, from my kitchen.