Destroyed by sense of duty

Yet, officially, his name is still held in ignominy. The same qualities that made Detective Lieutenant Trench were also used to destroy both him and his reputation. Successive attempts to clear his name have been rejected.

The first serious reappraisal of Trench since 1969 may be about to change that. A difficult decision confronts Scottish Secretary of State Donald Dewar. It is one which must address the questions of professional codes of duty against personal ethics, and inflexible law against the interests of justice.

On September 14, 1914, Trench was dismissed from the City of Glasgow Police. He was aged 45 and he had 21 years of service. Pension rights were forfeited for himself, his young wife, and their six children. His rank of Detective Lieutenant was equivalent to Chief Inspector today.

The breach in regulations was over Trench's decision to release privileged information without the permission of his Chief Constable in order to cast doubt on the 1909 conviction of Oscar Slater for the murder of Miss Marion Gilchrist.

The facts of the Slater case have been too widely discussed and analysed over the years to require repetition here, but Trench's role needs some explanation. He was among the detectives at the flat at 15 Queen's Terrace, now West Princess Street, on the night of December 21, 1908. The body of Miss Gilchrist had been found in the dining room. She had been battered to death. The initial lead was that two witnesses, Miss Gilchrist's servant, Helen Lambie, and a neighbour, Arthur Adams, had gone to the front door as a man emerged and rushed past them down the tenement stairs. A description was issued.

Trench's curiosity about the first of these two witnesses was aroused two days later when he was instructed to interview Mrs Margaret Birrell, a niece of the victim. It was to Mrs Birrell that the servant Lambie had gone with the grim news of the murder discovery. Mrs Birrell and Lambie would both deny it years after, but Trench remained adamant that Lambie said she recognised the man on the stairs as Dr Francis Charteris, a relative by marriage of the victim. Trench claimed that when he reported this, he was told by senior investigation officers that Dr Charteris, a member of a highly respectable and well connected family, had been cleared of suspicion. He further claimed that he was later instructed to warn Mrs Birrell against repeating her story.

The possible significance of this was amplified at the trial of Oscar Slater five months later. Helen Lambie testified that it was Slater, a German Jew, who she had seen leaving the flat. This and another alleged identification of Slater in the street outside Miss Gilchrist's flat was virtually the only solid prosecution evidence against him. Trench gave evidence about an identification parade in which Slater had been made conspicuous in a line-up of police officers and railway officials in plain clothes.

Cross-examined on whether it would have been fairer to present Slater among men who more resembled him, Trench responded: ''It might be the fairest way, but it is not the practice in Glasgow.'' This may have had a caustic ring detected by his superiors, who evaded the question of fairness.

The verdict of guilty with a death sentence, commuted to life imprisonment at the last minute, left Trench with serious misgivings. He wrestled with his conscience for a further three years. What appears to have persuaded him to stick his neck out was an entirely different case. In 1912 he was seconded to a Dundee murder investigation. Five witnesses identified a Canadian, Charles Warner, as the murderer. Warner claimed he was in Antwerp at the time of the crime. Trench went to Antwerp, located a shop where Warner claimed to have pawned a waistcoat on the day of the murder, and returned to Dundee with the article of clothing to support Warner's alibi. The parallels with the Slater case, and the fragility of witness identifications, persuaded Trench to act.

He approached a lawyer, David Cook, with a statement and copies of documents from police files. Both men believed the material proved Slater's innocence. Negotiations with Scottish Secretary of State Thomas McKinnon Wood resulted in a promise that ''best consideration'' would be given to the new evidence. On this basis Trench decided to go public.

The closed-doors hearing, set up in Glasgow in 1914, sealed Trench's fate. He was left exposed by police and civilian witnesses who perjured themselves. Despite appeals to the Secretary of State, who had appeared to invite Trench to come forward, his suspension from duty followed swiftly. The dismissal was agreed unanimously by Glasgow magistrates. Thus, Trench appeared to become the second scapegoat in an establishment cover-up. Not only did McKinnon Wood decline to intervene, he chose not to reply to Trench's personal letter appealing for support.

Thomas Toughill, a former Hong Kong police inspector dedicated a 1993 book to the memory of Trench as ''a man of whom any society should be proud''. The award-winning Oscar Slater: The Mystery Revealed presented Trench as ''the hero of the case''. It concluded: ''Surely, by all that is decent and right, the very least the city of Glasgow can do is to restore him posthumously to the police force he served so well.''

Last week Toughill commented: ''Trench was obviously right in what he said. He was kicked out for telling the truth, and then almost imprisoned. It was a scandal. I don't think they will ever be able to admit it.''

This pessimistic assessment could be proved wrong. The new investigation into the Trench case was prompted by a simple letter to Mr Dewar from a retired medical administration officer, Mr John Scott, who had long been fascinated by the role of the detective in the Slater affair. Mr Scott wrote last October, asking Mr Dewar to consider a pardon. The Police Division of the Scottish Office Home Department was asked to look into the matter, and a report was requested from Strathclyde Police.

Inspector Alistair Finlay, staff officer to the Deputy Chief Constable, confirmed that the findings are almost complete and will be forwarded to the Scottish Office in the next few days.

He commented: ''Mr Trench does come over as a person fighting for some degree of truth.

''The charge appears to have been technically correct, but it raises a moral question. It is not a case of black and white. There is a balance between the morality of an action and the legality of an action.''

It appears that this is a major concession which may demonstrate that old sensitivities over Trench have not been inherited by a new generation. Councillor John Young recalls the ''blocking'' he encountered in 1969 when a motion was put forward to the Glasgow Corporation Magistrates Committee for an inquiry into Trench. It was voted down, much to the disappointment of the widow, Mrs Margaret Trench, who lived on to the age of 100 before her death in 1975. The solitary success of this campaign was to establish the John Thomson Trench Prize at Glasgow University for ''distinctive and original contributions in the field of social science, to the welfare of the university or of the wider community''. This prize still exists.

But what of Trench himself? After his dismissal he rejoined the Army (in which he had served before enlisting in the police) and was a Quartermaster Sergeant on his discharge in 1918. He didn't lived long enough to enjoy the vindication brought by the eventual acquittal of Slater in 1928. Trench's death came prematurely at the age of 50 in 1919. Persecution continued even after his dismissal. He and David Cook, the lawyer, were both arrested and charged with resetting. No evidence was produced in court and the men were acquitted in 1915. A measure of the stress suffered by both in this blatant hounding was that Cook died in 1921.

In retrospect, it can now be seen that Trench was wrong about the man he suspected of bludgeoning Miss Gilchrist with a heavy dining room chair. According to Toughill's persuasive theory, Dr Francis Charteris (who went on to become professor of materia medica at St Andrews University before his death at the age of 88 in 1964) was the man called ''AB'' after the 1914 inquiry. He was the figure who emerged from Miss Gilchrist's flat, but he was not the killer. As Charteris rummaged Miss Gilchrist's document case in a bedroom, according to Toughill, it was Wingate Birrell who lost control with Miss Gilchrist and ended up smashing her skull with the chair.

Trench remained in the dark about Wingate Birrell, a black sheep in the family whose identity was concealed by the witnesses. Wingate Birrell has been discovered to have been Helen Lambie's secret fiance. Having lied at Slater's trial, and therefore being prepared to put the neck of an innocent man in the noose, Toughill suggests that it was a ''bagatelle'' for the same witnesses to ruin the career of Trench at the 1914 inquiry.

Mr Scott is modest about his role in reopening the Trench files. At his home in Burnside, Glasgow, a short distance from the grave of Trench in Rutherglen Cemetery, which he has visited for decades, he said: ''I'm not important in this, just the catalyst. Everything should be done to keep the name of Trench in the view of the public. Obviously, he made powerful enemies. It was a pyramid structure of society and anyone who bucked the system was hammered.''

The decision on rehabilitation will rest finally with Mr Dewar. Mr Scott believes he is a fair-minded man with an intuitive sense of justice, not always a trait in someone who has had a legal training.

It would be appropriate if one Scottish Secretary should put right the betrayal of another. It was McKinnon Wood who encouraged Trench to come forward with evidence, then abandoned him to his fate when the establishment took its revenge. Donald Dewar could overlook the legal technicalities and the lack of an official mechanism by restoring John Thomson Trench as an exemplar of integrity in Scottish policing.