[ { "id": 209486, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1982", "page_number": 143, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "121\n\nemotional man, he was the darling of the public but less popular with Judges and members of the English Bar.\n\nIt was not easy, given the facts outlined above, for Marshall Hall to establish a sound defence, one that would save the unfortunate man from the gallows. The three murders — that of his Welsh wife (born Catherine Morgan) and of his two daughters, Doris (20) and Cecilia (18) — appeared to be unmotivated. Since Marshall Hall could not understand why Lock went berserk, he concluded he must have been insane when he committed the crimes. In 1925 a plea of insanity had to satisfy the M'Naghten Rules. These rules declared:\n\n'to establish a defence on the ground of insanity it must be clearly proved that, at the time of committing the act, the accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong'.8\n\nBut when Lock phoned the Liverpool police and reported the murders, it was clear he knew what he had done and that it was wrong, and that he expected to be punished.\n\nIf the case were tried today, it seems likely his counsel would plead 'diminished responsibility'.10 In 1925, needless to say, such a plea was not available to the defence, so Marshall Hall fell back on a rather dubious argument, supported by questionable medical and psychiatric evidence, that Lock acted as he did in a state of 'unconscious automatism', brought on by an epileptic fit.11\n\nIn 1918 some drunken Russian sailors had attempted to enter the Chinese Republic Progress Club, run by Lock; a fight had broken out when he attempted to eject them and he had been stunned by a billiard cue. Witnesses for the defence averred that his behaviour started to change afterwards, that he began to drink heavily at times, but more so when, in 1923, he lost much of his fortune — £10,000 — in an unsuccessful shipping venture. As Marshall Hall argued: \"Some minute happening in the brain caused a change for which none of us can account, turned a man — a mild, lovable, peaceable man — into a raving madman. Absolutely and entirely motiveless, he killed those", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209488, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1982", "page_number": 145, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "123 is unnecessary, though, of course, always useful. What has to be proved by the prosecution, before there is a verdict of guilty, is that the accused committed the act in circumstances amounting to murder, not why he did so',16\n\nAs there was no reason to doubt that Lock committed the three murders he never denied that and it was certain he was not legally insane under the M'Naghten Rules, the verdict was a proper one. So Lock was executed on March 23, 1926, at Walton Gaol, Liverpool. A French court would have spent much time exploring the problem of motivation; and in the pre-trial period, a French examining magistrate would have rigorously questioned Lock, and other witnesses and parties, and prepared a dossier on the history of the crime. But this is not English legal practice: an English court is concerned primarily with evidence, less so with obscure problems of why men act as they do.\n\nTennyson Jesse maintains that all murders may be reduced to one of six types: murder for gain, for revenge, for elimination, for jealousy, or as a result of lust of killing, or from conviction (such as Orsini's attempt to assassinate Napoleon III, which failed, but led to the death of a number of bystanders).17 She does not include insanity in her typology because a madman is presumed to act irrationally, and it is not easy to unscramble a deranged mind. But if we accept her classification, then we must exclude Lock: he does not fit apparently into any of her divisions.\n\nIf we return to Lock's biography, we may discover clues that could account for his behaviour. As outlined above, Lock settled in England when he was twenty-three; worked for a time as clerk or assistant for a shipping agency until he became an independent businessman and an agent for three British shipping lines employing Chinese seamen. By hard work and frugal living, he amassed a small fortune, and became a spokesman community leader for the Liverpool Chinese community and, later, a spokesman for all Chinese in England. By 1924, when he was to lose most of his fortune, he was the most respected Chinese in England, certainly on Merseyside where he saw to it", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209503, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1982", "page_number": 160, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "138\n\nH. J. LETHBRIDGE\n\nstatus of China in the world polity and of Chinese in general as citizens of the world).\n\n54\n\nNo one believes today that Chinese motivation needs a separate system of explanation, that the Chinese mind has its own eccentric circuitry. Freud, that Columbus of the Mind, revealed that in the unconscious · the deep, dark, oceanic under-world of the individual human beings are very much alike in their mechanisms. This great step forward in social perception has helped to bridge the gap between the races (still opposed of course by politics) and has made murder less incomprehensible, less inexplicable when committed by foreigners; and judges, counsel and juries (perhaps) less perplexed by the act.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 George Orwell, Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965) 9.\n\n* 'Our great period in murder', Orwell writes, our Elizabethan period, so to speak, seems to have been roughly 1850-1925. Orwell was writing in 1946, but with hindsight it is plausible to suggest the 'great period' could be extended to the eve of World War I.\n\n* See: Jean Chesneaux, The Chinese Labour Movement 1919-1927 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1968) 122.\n\n• See, in particular, Harold Z. Schriffrin, Sun Yat-sen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970). Also Nym Wales, The Chinese Labor Movement (New York: John Day, 1945), which contains the biographies of some revolutionary seamen.\n\n• Edward Marjoribanks, Famous Trials of Marshall Hall (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1950) 384. At his trial Lock was described as a 'Chinese shipping agent'.\n\n• Sir Henry Dickens in The Recollections of Sir Henry Dickens, K.C. (London: Heinemann, 1934) 244-245, writes: He was a good advocate but it cannot be truly said that he was a great one. He had not the gift of far-seeing discretion which is required in a great advocate. He was much too ready to talk at length when addressing a jury, without having previously weighed the possible consequences of what he said'. An old lag once called from the dock to Sir Henry (1849-1933). 'You ain't a patch on your father!', which greatly amused him.\n\nT\n\nSee Marjoribanks, op cit. Doris Lock did not die from her wounds until January 28, 1926. See The Times of January 29, 1926.\n\n* There is a full discussion of the origin of the M'Naghten Rules in Nigel Walker, Crime and Insanity in England, vol 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968).\n\n* Marjoribanks, op cit, 383. See also The Times February 4 and 8, 1926.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 } ]