The Man Who Created the Middle East: A Story of Empire, Conflict and the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Christopher Sykes Simon
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in his young wife by expecting her to accompany him to racecourses all over England. As a result of this, he told the court, she ‘engaged to a considerable extent in that form of excitement’. Sir Tatton was also parsimonious to a degree that he was prepared to allow an overdraft of £20,000 to permanently exist at his bank, in spite of the heavy interest, because he could not bear to call up the cash to pay it off. In addition to this, the jury were told, he was a recluse who never went out into society – since they were married, she had never once been out to a party or out to dine with him – and who shirked responsibility for the payment of almost all expenses necessary for the upkeep of two houses.
After giving a brief account of the charges, he called Jessie to the stand, and in his cross-examination of her enlarged the picture of the extraordinary Sykes marriage. Nominally, she told the jury, she was to have £1,000 a year, but it was always a fight to get it. She had found herself living in a house ‘as large as Devonshire House’16 to which very little had been done since 1801 and which then had no drains. Sir Tatton paid for nothing, and whenever she applied to him for money he was very tiresome. At one point, before the birth of her son, she had even been obliged to sue him for her pin money. As a result of this attitude, she had, with his knowledge, begun to borrow money, and had been doing so for eighteen years. Her debts had consequently increased like a snowball ‘and time did not improve them’. She knew, she claimed, it was ‘an idiotic thing’17 to do, and would never have done it had she been able to get the money elsewhere.
Cross-examined by Tatton’s junior QC, Mr Bucknill, she elicited laughter from the court when, in answer to his question as to whether she considered her husband was a sound business man, she replied that in her opinion he was ‘as capable of managing his own affairs as most women’.18 As an example, she cited the fact that instead of reading his letters, many of which contained share dividends, he often just threw them in the wastepaper basket. She had once found, she recalled, a warrant for a very large sum from Spiers and Paul in the bin, and had asked him to give it to her as a reward. She also intimated to the court that Tatton knew about her betting and was very proud when she won. He would tell everybody he saw about it, and always wanted £100 out of her winnings. When asked if she was angry after he had placed the advertisement in the newspapers, she replied, ‘You are not angry with people who are like children … He is like a child in many ways … Yes, like a naughty child.’19
Most of the notes in question, she told Mr Bucknill, were signed in Grosvenor Street, and she had explained to Tatton that she wanted him to sign them in order for her to get money. It was unlikely, she had assured him, that he would ever have to pay up. When questioned closely about the times and dates of the various notes, she became vague, saying Tatton ‘did not mind what he signed’ and repeating, ‘He would not give me any money, so I had to borrow.’ As Bucknill piled on the pressure she was reduced to repeating the defence that ‘Sir Tatton knew all about it, but he had a bad memory.’20
Re-examined by Mr Walton, Jessie reiterated that all the signatures purporting to be Sir Tatton’s were made by him, in her presence. These included those on two cheques for £1,000 signed in 1895 in Monte Carlo, and cashed at Smith and Co.’s Bank, which Tatton subsequently claimed to be forgeries. ‘Sometimes he used to say he had signed guarantees, sometimes that he had not,’ Jessie rambled on, her testimony having become rather disconnected. ‘It never made any difference to our way of living. He never treated me as having been guilty of a great crime. I do not think he realized what forgery meant. I have never had a cross word with him about it. I went over to Paris last October and lunched with him, and he said “Oh, it’s all the lawyers. It’s not my fault.”’21 Laughter filled the court room.
Two of Mark’s tutors were now called. Robert Beresford, who succeeded Doolis, told Mr Walton that, in his opinion, the signatures were those of Sir Tatton, though in cross-examination by his defence counsel, Sir Edward Clarke, he admitted that the last document he had seen him sign had been as far back as 1892, and that the more recent signatures ‘were blurred and unlike his normal signature’. When asked by Lord Russell if he considered Sir Tatton an intelligent man, he caused a stir by answering that he had always thought him to be suffering from incipient insanity. ‘He would go about in ten coats,’ he told a surprised court. ‘You don’t mean that literally?’ asked Lord Russell, adding, ‘You mean two or three.’ ‘No I don’t,’ he replied. ‘I mean seven or eight overcoats one over the other … I can swear to that distinctly, because there were five covert coats, and one or two silk coats.’ When Egerton Beck was called to the stand and told the court that, in spite of Sir Tatton being ‘habitually a sober man’, one signature did not look as if it were written by a very sober person, Sir Edward asked, ‘That observation as to sobriety does not apply to Lady Sykes?’22 Luckily for Jessie, Lord Russell forbade that line of questioning.
The third day of the trial began with Lord Russell asking Tatton to make two copies of the letter of 2 January, with two different pens. While he was doing this, Sir Edward Clarke opened the case for the defence. The question before the jury, he said, was a simple, if serious, one. Did Sir Tatton sign the notes, or were they forgeries by Lady Sykes? ‘A case more painful to an English gentleman,’ he continued, ‘could not be imagined.’ Called to the stand, Tatton ‘gave his evidence in a low voice with a slow, nervous, hesitating manner, and kept repeating his answers over and over again, repeatedly fingering the Bible which lay on the desk before him, and occasionally raising it and striking the woodwork sharply to emphasise what he said.’ He had never seen the notes and he had never signed them, and he had certainly not written the letter of 2 January. He had never had any need to borrow money, he said, preferring to keep an overdraft at the bank, which could run to any amount, since the bank had securities. After the advertisement had appeared, he had agreed to make a final payment of his wife’s liabilities ‘to avoid scandal! To avoid scandal! To avoid scandal!’23
Cross-examined by Mr Walton, Tatton caused much amusement by asking if his lawyers could ‘refresh his memory’ about the details of the alleged Monte Carlo forgeries. So great in fact was the laughter when Mr Walton said ‘No!’, that Lord Russell had to threaten to empty the courtroom. Walton then did his best to try and show that Tatton really had very little memory of what he had signed and what he had not, but he could not sway him from the basic fact that when it came to the Jay notes, he was adamant that he had nothing to do with them. The copies he had made earlier of the 2 January letter were then shown to the jury, Tatton complaining that the pens he had had to write with were too thin. When Mr Walton said that that was because the original was written with a quill pen, Tatton stated, ‘Well, I have not used a quill pen for 40 years,’24 leaving his interrogator floundering.
Mr Walton, who saw his case collapsing, now revealed that Mark was in court, and, though he realized that ‘it was a painful thing to ask him to give evidence on the one side or the other’,25 he invited Lord Russell to call him onto the stand so that he might be questioned as to the veracity of these dates. This the Lord Chief Justice refused to do, though he told him that he could do so himself if he so wished. Though at first Walton decided against this course of action, on the morning of the following day, destined to be the last of the trial, he changed his mind.
It was a devastating experience for Mark to be forced into the witness box to testify that one of his parents was a liar, and, as Sir Edward Clarke told the jury in his summing up, his evidence was so vague and therefore so inconclusive that he might have been spared the ordeal. It was given in a barely audible whisper. In his final address, Sir Edward gave no quarter to Jessie, whom he described as a woman of ‘discreditable character’, for whom there could be ‘no sympathy and perhaps no credence’. When it came to the turn of the counsel for the plaintiff, Mr Walton accused Tatton of being a man without honour. ‘The disaster of victory,’ he told the jury,