The outline career of British Guiana-born Oxford graduate Edward T. Nelson is on page 188 of this website. He settled in Hale, Cheshire where he was remembered, with respect, into the 1980s – forty years after his death in 1940. He served as a councillor from 1913 until his death, and was the town’s mayor. His name and reputation in the area had broadened because of his role as defence barrister in a murder trial. The trial had a most unusual feature, in that there had been a earlier trial, of a different accused man: probably unique in English legal history. See Jonathan Goodman’s The Stabbing of George Harry Storrs (London: Allison and Busby, 1983; Headline Books, 1988) and Jeffrey Green, Black Edwardians [London: Cass, 1998] (pages 200-202).

The murdered man was George Harry Storrs, a wealthy contractor who had been stabbed to death at his home, Gorse Hall, on the night of 1 November 1909. The story is complex, with details of a revolver – the death had been through stabbing – the confusion over the two ex-soldiers who, separately, were accused of murder – apparent contradictions in the testimony of house servants – and, most oddly to a modern eye, an absence of motive. Sometimes reported as the “Storrs Murder” and also “Gorse Hall Murder”, news of the trials was widespread, for the United Press Association’s telegraphed reports even reached New Zealand (Lyttelton Times, 5 March 1910, page 9). The local Stalybridge Reporter carried reports of course.

That the defence barrister was of African descent was briefly noted: “a coloured man” (Irish News and Belfast Evening News, 4 March 1910, page 6), and “the coloured barrister” (Bristol Times and Mirror, 29 October 1910, page 8).

The first trial was of Cornelius Howard, who was a cousin of Storrs. Nelson had found five witnesses whose testimony in March 1910 led the jury to find Howard innocent. The second trial was of Mark Wilde. The jury found the case was not strong enough – and surely had been influenced by a melodramatic trick of Nelson. Aware that Howard had increased weight by thirty pounds, Nelson had the two men stand side by side, and then insisted that the court’s lights were turned higher (Bristol Times and Mirror, 27 October 1910, page 9). The similarities between the two men were no longer obvious.

The sensational murder trial, in London, of Dr Crippen, kept the double-accused murder trials in Chester out of the public eye.