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Albert Black.
A young Irishman from Belfast.
His story would break your heart. It broke mine.
He came to New Zealand when he was just eighteen, full of the vigour and expectations of youth. It was 1953. He was an emigrant, what was known as a ten-pound Pom. He travelled aboard the SS Captain Cook on a cheap government-sponsored fare to find work and a future in a new country. My dad did that too. The bargain was that you worked for two years in your new country before you could change your mind and leave. Albert’s grandmother had given him the money, the ten quid he needed.
Albert Black, who came to be known as Paddy, never left. He is buried in an Auckland cemetery. I was given to understand that his body was placed in a makeshift grave in the corner of Mount Eden Prison, where hanged men were buried, before being despatched to Waikumete Cemetery.
My father never went home to Ireland either; he lived on and on into old age but in the end I think he died of a broken heart, of homesickness and longing. Isn’t that the immigrant story?
I think it is part of Albert’s story.
It was part of the story, too, of Alan Jacques, whom Albert was accused of murdering. He was a migrant youth too, an unwilling deportee from Britain, where orphanages were emptying out their premises after the Second World War. Except Jacques wasn’t an orphan; as it turned out, he just wasn’t wanted. Not wanted on the voyage, not valued on his arrival. A bitter young man who got into a brawl in a milk bar in Auckland’s Queen Street. The knife that killed him was wielded by Albert Black, but Jacques carried one too. The case came to be known as the ‘juke box murder’.
Two foolish fallen boys. There were girls in the story as well, but then there often are.
The more I looked into the matter, the more I became convinced that the verdict should have been manslaughter. I am still convinced of this. At the heart of the verdict lies deep prejudice. Prejudice against the outsider, the ‘foreigner’. I ended up writing a novel called This Mortal Boy, which addresses my conviction as well as I can.
I hadn’t planned to write this book. But it arose out of a number of preoccupations. I have a son and grandsons. As they grew up, I was beset by the fear that one of them would make a dreadful mistake. Even the best young people are capable of these – like being in the wrong place at the wrong time, getting into a fight, one terrifying party, drinking and driving or getting in a car with someone who is, taking an accidental overdose, jumping off a pier into shallow water at midnight. These young men who so absorbed me made it through. But I’m still drawn to reports of others who have not made it. I look at the gaunt, lost faces of their parents, hear the warnings that have come too late for their own children.
For as long as I can remember I’ve been opposed to the death penalty. I can’t say how my opposition began, but it has mattered since I was in my teens. Perhaps it was conversations overheard about the hangings that happened with grim regularity in the 1950s. Or perhaps it was the time, the year after Albert Black’s hanging, that I spent working as a clerk in a courthouse, where justice often seemed scant. Anyway, one day about five years ago, I picked up a newspaper and read an article about Albert’s long-ago case. I was fifteen back then, and he was twenty. It all came together – the boy who made a mistake, the loving mother trying to save his life, my own Irish connections through my father and that whole era of the 1950s of which I was a part. There was a rustling in my brain that said, This is the story. It said: I know this boy.
Recently, I was invited to begin a public conversation about Albert Black by describing what 1950s New Zealand was like for me. I did my best. At first, I said that the era was by and large pretty good for me, that although it had a reputation for being a dour, grim, post-war decade without colour, I didn’t find that. After an early childhood beset by the usual angst – a miserable back story is always an advantage for a writer – the next part wasn’t a bad life at all. In my early teens I lived on a farm, milked cows morning and night, loving the heaving flanks of the beautiful animals, had friends, was part of a caring community in the Far North. From there, I moved to Rotorua. It was a teenagers’ playground, with a carnival at New Year and an abundance of dance halls and milk bars. I wore my cardigans back to front with the sleeves pushed up in a flirtation with widgie culture, hung out at a notorious but wonderful dance hall called Tamatekapua, where there was a blind saxophonist called Tai Paul and a crooning young singer called Howard Morrison, who swayed his hips. There was flickering electricity that went on and off, and at half-time we were treated to a cooked supper. My 1950s ended with a marriage proposal, which I accepted, and that marriage survived until I became a widow four years ago.
At this point, I hesitated because, by then, there were a few raised eyebrows. And so I found myself reflecting on what I had said.
As a librarian, in those days, I was in charge of the banned book section at the public library where I worked. There, in the stack room, reached by way of a ladder, sat Madame Bovary and Peyton Place plus Ideal Marriage, which described the mechanics of sex. A useful thing for a girl to get her hands on, especially if she faced the terrors of unprotected sex from time to time and an unexpected pregnancy. I was spared that disaster but I knew the fear, the tyranny of the late period, and how a family, and the girl (but not the boy) could be brought to their knees by the shame.
There were book burnings too, if police happened upon banned literature in shops, so my guardianship of the titles on the library’s mezzanine floor was particularly acute. The death penalty swam in and out of sight, depending on whether a right-or left-wing government was in power, meaning that it was administered on a political basis. I loved and was loved in return by my mother’s rural relatives, but I knew better than to question their values. In short, the price of my unruly weekend freedoms, when I cast aside my librarian’s grey tailored suit, was learning to walk on eggshells pretty well every day of my life, not just for what I did but what I said.
In other words, I remembered the dark side of 1950s New Zealand.
I am first and foremost a writer of fiction, meaning I make things up. These days, I write historical novels that require research. It doesn’t mean that facts, the things we know really happened, are not facts. As nearly as I can, I shadow the truth of what the record tells me. The invented parts are unrecorded interactions between characters, the parts we can never really know: who said what in every conversation, what dreams our characters have had, who slept with whom at any given time, the secrets of the heart. But it’s possible to draw certain conclusions from those things that history says are true and, drawing on all our experience, to dramatise the action and bring the characters closer to us and our own truths.
Albert’s parents were Albert and Kathleen Black. They were married in St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast, in 1932. Albert junior was the second of three sons, born in July 1935. The first child, William, had died in infancy; Daniel, the third, was ten years younger than his surviving brother. After the death of the first child, who appears to have been the impetus for his parents’ marriage, Albert was a much longed for boy. His mother surrounded him with a fierce protective love. By all accounts, from surviving relatives I have traced since This Mortal Boy was published, he was a gentle kid and, as it happens, that is how I had portrayed him. They were a Protestant family in that beleaguered and divided city. His da was profoundly deaf. I wasn’t aware of this when I wrote the book and I don’t know the cause of it. I surmised that it was a war injury. Certainly, his grandfather came from a regimental background. At the time of Albert’s birth the family lived in Tate Avenue, about which Seamus Heaney wrote a poem that includes this stanza:
Instead, again, it’s locked-park Sunday Belfast,
A walled back yard, the dust bins high and silent
As a page is turned, a finger twirls warm hair
And nothing gives on the rug or the ground beneath it.
It is an unremarkable-looking street, as those first two lines suggest. But see how the third and fourth lines pick up and project life, tenderness and an alertness to an inner existence behind the curtained windows. That is how it appeared to me, on the day when I went looking for the house where Albert first lived. It was modest and two-storeyed, brick like all the others, standing at the end of a path with a neat floral border. There was nobody home that day I knocked on the door.
The second Black home was off Sandy Row, in Gay Street, which no longer exists in name, for reasons that are perhaps predictably unsurprising – though I have always thought gay a lovely word, evocative and sprightly, and one that still belongs to all of us. The change meant that this second house was untraceable, but it would have been close to Blythe Street Public Elementary School, which Albert attended until he was fourteen. He was, as we shall see, literate, and wrote in a strong sweeping hand, but jobs were not easy to come by. He was a slight youth, five feet eight in his stockinged feet, with a head of luxuriant dark hair and fine features. That’s as I see him in three of the four photographs I have, good looking with that blackbird on the wing kind of Irish charm. In the fourth photograph, perhaps near the end, he looks child-like and exhausted. His first job was in a linen mill, and after that he worked on and off as a plumber’s helper for the Belfast Corporation Gas Department. When he was seventeen he took up labouring. It was around then that his grandmother, who lived round the corner in Sandy Row, gave him the money to start a new life.
On board the Captain Cook, where he was renamed Paddy, he quickly made friends. In particular, he became close to a lad from Liverpool called Peter Simpson, and another couple who settled in Christchurch. It was Peter Simpson who would keep Albert’s last letters, written from Mount Eden.
Albert and Peter, indentured for two years to a government department, were sent to work in the Hutt Valley, north of Wellington, for Post and Telegraph. At first, they were housed in a transit camp but, soon tiring of that, sought accommodation with a widow in the local suburb of Naenae. This woman, called Rose in the book, provided a stable home for the two young men. She had a garden with roses and taught music; there were home-cooked meals and friendly cats. Albert and Peter became part of the family. One of the children, a small girl at the time, remembers Albert singing, helping to build a playhouse, keeping a pet hedgehog and crying when it died, and a Christmas when she stood on his feet while he waltzed her around the living room. She remembers his gentleness.
The land in the Hutt Valley, once covered in a forest dense with nikau palms and rimu, had been disputed land, fought over by Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Rangatahi tribes, before successive waves of occupying settlers cleared it of its natural groundcover. Rose’s quarter-acre section backed onto market gardens, first planted in the rich valley soils by the Chinese in the late nineteenth century and taken over by returned servicemen at the end of the Second World War. Then came an enveloping tide of houses, row upon row of square plain dwellings built by the state as rentals for low-income families. A wide river dominates the landscape; it eddies and swirls beneath willow trees, and it can flood the entire valley. A delta fans back from the river and flares towards the Wainuiomata hills, which burn brown beneath summer skies of cobalt heartache blue. In the years after Albert Black left Naenae, I came to know the place well. For thirty-five years Ian taught at the high school there. He had a little office at the periphery of the school buildings where he saw troubled kids each day. Most of them lived in those huddled post-war houses.
In 1953 the Hutt Valley became the centre of a storm about teenage morals. Underage girls, the newspapers trumpeted, were said to be having sex on the banks of the Hutt River and ‘petting’ in the back seats of the local picture theatres. To make matters worse, they were meeting leather-jacketed boys who rode motorbikes around Elbe’s, the local milk bar. The movie Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean, was still a couple of years away, but the influence of a different kind of culture, an American one, which people saw as having started with the ‘Yanks’ in wartime New Zealand, was becoming pervasive. It had to be stamped out.
Bodgies and widgies, comic books and Mickey Spillane, suggestive American songs on the hit parades. The bodgies wore stovepipe trousers and thick-soled shoes, and hair greased with Brylcreem touching their collars. And coloured socks. Lime green or red or pink, colour manifesting itself after the drab years of the war. The widgies wore their cardigans back to front with the sleeves pushed up to their elbows, one of the sure signs a girl was going off the rails. Or, pedal-pushers, tight three-quarter-length pants, another sign of degradation.
Prime Minister Sid Holland, who had swept into power in 1949 on promises to treat farmers well and break the power of the unions, had used strong-armed tactics during the 1951 Waterfront Dispute. His government had also restored the death penalty, which had been suspended by the Labour government of the previous fourteen years. Now he ordered a report on this dangerous delinquent behaviour.
Sex, he made clear (although he preferred the term carnal knowledge), was not something polite people talked about, and young people had no right to get up to it. Young girls needed protecting from themselves. (It wasn’t so bad for boys.) They would never get husbands if they got up to tricks beforehand. If a girl fell pregnant, she got sent away, out of sight [usually to work as a domestic servant in a rural household or to a hard labour ‘home’ for unmarried mothers], or hastily married in her parents’ front room if the father could be captured. That is, and here the voices lowered even further, if the girl knew for sure who the father was. Or if she was even old enough to get married.
The man chosen to head the inquiry into the morals of teenagers all over the country was a high-profile and God-fearing lawyer called Oswald Mazengarb, who had a flair for the dramatic in court, and political ambition. He was also a close friend of Sid Holland. The revelations from the inquiry shocked the older generation and fulfilled their worst nightmares: teenagers were running amok. Mazengarb’s report was made public and landed in the letterboxes of anxious parents, just before the 1954 election, which National would win again by a handsome margin.
There is no way of knowing for certain why Albert decided to abscond, as it were, from his bond. There is a recurring suggestion that he was homesick, that the Hutt no longer appealed to him and that, if he could make his way to Auckland, he could earn more money and return to Belfast, or perhaps work his passage home on a ship. Nothing I was told suggested that he was involved in the Hutt scandals and Peter Simpson certainly was not. In January 1955, Albert would become the temporary custodian of a boarding house at 105 Wellesley Street in Auckland.
This is the way I half imagined, half learned of his leaving:
Paddy [Albert] arrived in Auckland after an overnight train journey through the central heart of the country late in January. He had slept little. The train stopped often at sidings and small towns lit by dim lanterns over station platforms, staying a few minutes, then seemingly picking itself up with a mournful blast of its whistle, hurtling further on into the night. Twice there were stops long enough for passengers to alight and join a crush of people at the counter where they bought food. He remembers buying a pie and a cup of tea in a thick white cup at one stop, a rock cake and more tea somewhere else. He sat upright in a second-class seat, and in the shadowy darkness of summer he glimpsed canyons of bush and, it seemed to him, desolation. His heart felt as if it would explode with grief. He had left behind the only people in the country who cared about him, the woman who had looked after him as if she were his mother, his friend who had emigrated with him, children who had welcomed his presence, the wee cutie who had danced on his feet.
Peter had been awake when he left. He was lying under the covers of his bed, smoking a cigarette …
‘Paddy, my old mucker, don’t go,’ Peter said, as Paddy stuffed his duds into his suitcase.
‘I have to, mate. I’ve got to get home to Ireland.’
The tangle of wooden houses, with their verandahs and alleyways between, have been replaced by high-rise buildings. There is nothing left to show what 105 Wellesley Street looked like in the 1950s. But it’s still just a five-minute walk to the main thoroughfare of Queen Street, past the neo-Gothic St Matthew-in-the-City, the turn-off to Albert Street and on to Smith & Caughey’s, the venerable department store. While there is no record of how Albert came to be in charge of the boarding house, we do know that the woman who owned the property was to be away for a few months. They had met within days of Albert’s arrival in Auckland. In return for taking care of the property, he would have free lodgings. He was not to allow people to stay there.
This is where things came unstuck. Albert was still only nineteen. Down the road and around the corner, in Upper Queen Street, was a café known as Ye Olde Barn, where patrons could buy cheap steak and chips. It was also a meeting place for the very people he had left behind in the Hutt Valley, mostly Kiwi kids done up as bodgies and widgies. Teddy boys congregated there too, and often young seamen, whose clothes were stylishly Edwardian to distinguish themselves as English. Or they may have come from Britain as children. New Zealand was one of several Commonwealth countries that took orphaned or abandoned children after the Second World War. Often, on arrival, they were sent to unsuitable homes like farms, where they were required to do heavy manual work or domestic duties and received little education.
I see myself sitting on the school bus in the Far North. At the front, a girl sits alone. Her name is Margaret. She wears a white blouse and a pleated skirt. Her face is very pale, her long hair caught in a bow. I think you’d call her pretty, but aloof. Or that is how she seemed to us other children on the bus. I remember we were told to leave her alone because she was unhappy and wanted to be by herself. Her surname was that of a local family, but then we heard that wasn’t her name at all. In fact, she wasn’t related to this family. And then she disappeared. How long did she sit there solitary and withdrawn? I don’t remember. Weeks, a few months at most.
At one of the farms where my husband lived as a child, he remembered another girl, whose name was ‘Jane’. She was supposed to be his sister. Or his cousin. Or something. She married into one of the families in that neighbourhood, and never left. We saw her now and then in the decades that followed, a righteous woman who bore a certain air of contempt when she talked about the locals, particularly those of colour. You could see it behind the smile; she wore her anger like a shroud.
Jane never left the farming area where she had been sent. But when many of these children were old enough to walk free, they tended to drift towards the cities, which felt more like the environment they were used to. There they banded together and proclaimed their differences.
Not long after Albert moved in, the house in Wellesley Street became party central. His new friends at Ye Olde Barn Café flocked to visit him and soon he was agreeing to people staying. He began to drift, moving around various labouring jobs, not staying long in any of them. He was also meeting and sleeping with a number of girls. It seems likely that at Rose’s house, where certain rules were observed, he had not had much opportunity to explore his sexuality. Now his options were wide open. He was undoubtedly handsome and he liked to sing and dance and to make love.
In the last month that he would live at the boarding house, six months into the Auckland sojourn, Albert turned twenty. Among the people lodging there was Alan Jacques.
Born in London, in January 1936, he was a year younger than Albert, although he passed himself off as twenty-four. He had been sent to New Zealand in January 1952 when he was almost seventeen, an age when he might have been considered old enough to refuse migration. He came as an unwilling companion to two younger sisters, under the auspices of the Child Welfare Department, who placed him with foster parents on a farm in Hawke’s Bay. His sisters went to other parts of the country. His mother was then living in Essex; it remains unclear why she allowed her children to be sent so far away. Alan was a well-developed youth, five foot eleven, with broad shoulders. It was said that he had done his three months’ compulsory military training immediately after being released from the farm. I was not able to confirm this but the theory makes sense and perhaps explains his undeniable fighting skills. (Albert appeared to have avoided service up until that point, possibly because he was indentured to the government.)
Alan Jacques modelled himself on Mickey Spillane’s Johnny McBride, the central character in The Long Wait, and assumed his identity. That novel was one of the books I had guarded on the mezzanine floor of the library. I reread it recently. Its violence, accounts of beatings and constant degrading encounters with women appal me. Johnny McBride, the character, carried a gun; Johnny McBride, the boy in Auckland, was known to carry a knife. McBride, the character, frequently insulted his enemies as ‘yellow bastards’. McBride, the boy, was known to use this epithet too.
From the outset, Albert and Jacques, under his McBride alias, rubbed each other up the wrong way. Survivors of that time say that Albert was terrified of McBride and his bullying ways.
Albert asked his lodger to leave 105 Wellesley Street. The landlady was due back and he needed to clear the house. Jacques, with nowhere to go, was angry and resentful.
Throughout much of July, Albert had been sick with a heavy cold. His twentieth birthday came and went. But as the time drew close for the landlady to return, his friends persuaded him to let them organise a party on Monday the 25th as a wrap for the occupation of the boarding house and, for Albert, a late birthday celebration.
The following day, the young men at Ye Olde Barn made plans to pick up beer and invite the girls. Albert asked one particular girl, although he had a steady girlfriend who had already been invited. I called her Bessie Marsh. The other girl was a sixteen-year-old I christened Rita Zilich. Rita went home after her work as a shorthand typist, ostensibly retired early and then climbed out of the window of her parents’ house, in order to go to the party. I did the same when I was sixteen. That yearning for the unexplored life, the wild energy that catapults us into our futures.
It’s not clear whether the invitation was directed to Rita as a potential partner for Albert, or whether she was invited because of the coterie of girls she would bring with her. As it happened, Alan Jacques, the uninvited guest, turned up at the party and, before long, Rita was making out with him in an alleyway beside the house. Albert appeared and ordered her inside. It has always been maintained that he was jealous of this interaction. Perhaps he was, or perhaps, recognising her age and some vulnerability, he wanted to protect her from Jacques. Bessie had left the party earlier in the evening.
In the violent clash that followed and spilled out onto the street, Jacques kicked Albert in the testicles, blackening his eyes and otherwise delivering bruising blows. Jacques left, pulled away by other partygoers, promising to finish Albert off the next day.
Rita stayed behind. Subsequently, there was some dispute over whether she had stayed willingly or wanted to go with Jacques. While Albert lay down to recover, she tidied up the living room, putting away a scout knife that Albert appears to have brought from Belfast that had been used for opening beer bottles. Albert talked in a generally maudlin way and they attempted to have sex, but he was too injured for this to happen. Rita appears to have been a willing partner. According to the evidence she later gave against him, as the night wore on, Albert muttered that he would kill Johnny McBride. He told Rita he expected to die young. She left around three in the morning, when Albert called a taxi for her.
The following day, the young men who had been at the party drank in a desultory way around Auckland’s pubs. Albert got up late, finished cleaning the house and later in the day, carrying his knife, went to a pub where he drank until he vomited and was thrown out. He then retreated to Ye Olde Barn Café where his mates, if that’s what they were, had assembled to eat. A group of Teddy-boys-turned-seamen also entered the café and sat down near the jukebox. One of them was another former child migrant from England named Richard Douglas, although he became Henry in the novel.
And it was at this point that the ‘incident’ occurred.
There are two versions of what happened. Albert would maintain that Jacques came in, told him to come outside and fight, called him ‘a dirty yellow Irish bastard’ and hit him in the face. Earlier that day, during Albert’s absence, Jacques had gone back to 105 Wellesley Street and put his belongings in a suitcase. Albert would state that he believed he was about to be killed. In order to save himself, he pulled the knife he was carrying and stabbed Jacques in the shoulder, hoping to scare him.
That is one version.
At the trial, the young men sitting by the jukebox would say that they saw nothing, that there was no exchange between Albert and Jacques. As Jacques stood, choosing a song, Albert had got up, walked over and stabbed him.
That is the second version.
Whichever you choose to believe, Albert left the café, accompanied by another youth. They walked to the nearby police station, where Albert made a series of muddled statements, claiming self-defence.
Back in the café, some of the young men had rolled Jacques over onto his back. The knife had sliced through his neck and emerged from his nose. Blood sprayed in all directions and panic ensued. Jacques died within minutes. A pathologist’s report would say that the initial stab wound was the cause of death – it had penetrated soft tissue and cut Jacques’ spinal cord.
The youths were terrified out of their wits and, it later appeared, believed that they had caused the death. When the police arrived, they offered themselves as witnesses but were told there were enough already. They then left the premises as quickly as they could.
Richard Douglas is still alive. He has a clear and exact recollection of that evening. In his version, an altercation did take place in front of the jukebox, before Albert retreated to his seat. Albert, he says, tried to play the Bing Crosby version of ‘Danny Boy’. His little brother back in Belfast was, of course, Daniel, or Danny. Jacques overrode this choice with, according to popular narrative, a song called ‘Evil Angels’. It seems more likely that it was ‘Earth Angel’, recorded by the Penguins in 1954.
Richard was therefore one of a number of potential witnesses who were not called at the subsequent Supreme Court trial in Auckland the following October. But, from his different vantage point, he maintains that there was a disagreement between Albert and Jacques, and that the threat Albert complained of may have been made then. Although Richard doesn’t recall a punch, his detailed memories of the ensuing minutes have been put to the test over a number of interviews and his story holds up. All these years later, we appear to have a truly credible witness.
Alan Jacques had immersed himself so deeply in the character of Johnny McBride that it was several days before his true identity was revealed, confirmed by the farmer for whom he had worked after his arrival in New Zealand. Jacques was carrying a clasp knife with a 4-inch blade.
A grand jury no longer features in the New Zealand justice system, but in the 1950s it was part of any serious prosecution in the Supreme Court. A collection of between twelve and twenty-three citizens had to decide and recommend that the case could go to trial before a twelve-person common jury. The same judge would preside over both juries, but the grand jury deliberated behind closed doors. Reporters were admitted but were not supposed to disclose the judge’s comments until the trial was over. In this instance, however, they did make public what was said by the judge, a man called George Finlay:
The offender is not one of ours, except by adoption and apparently comes from the type that we could well be spared in our country. He belongs to a peculiar sect, if you could call it that, or a peculiar association of individuals whose outlook on life differs from the normal. It is unfortunate that we got this undesirable from his homeland. It is a case of an apparently deliberate stabbing in a restaurant in Upper Queen Street, and there seems no opening of either provocation or self-defence, or any of the defences usually presented in a case of this kind.
These comments were reported in the Auckland Star and the New Zealand Herald. On the night before the trial began and on the morning it started, 18 October 1955, these newspapers were delivered to the rooms of the sworn-in members of the common jury, who were staying at the Station Hotel.
It seems impossible that a trial without prejudice could have taken place. Surely, one would think, it should have been aborted. Some contemporary legal experts agree that it should not have gone ahead. But it did.
My jury members are fictional. But I have been on juries and I know how they work and I know how prejudice can influence outcomes. I have seen it at work and it’s ugly. If I have a regret about the book, it’s that I reordered the events, placing the delivery of the newspapers at the end of the trial, rather than the beginning. Call it ‘the writer’s journey’, so beloved of screenwriters. I would write that differently now. Nevertheless, it’s damning, either way you look at it.
The testimony of the young men and women who gave evidence at the trial seems questionable. I think of Rita, turned Crown witness. From the transcripts of her evidence, it’s clear that she was intelligent, quick-witted and, back then, perhaps too adventurous for her own good. She understood authority and parental boundaries but she was willing to break free of them, provided she didn’t get caught. But she did. Her and Albert’s accounts of what was said at 105 Wellesley Street the night before the incident in the café would vary.
Eye-witness accounts of the trial describe her as dressed in a fitting black suit and wearing a black beret on her tawny red hair. Her manner appears to have been defiant, perhaps as a mantle of protection. She was sixteen and one must assume that her truth was her own. But so much of this trial came down to one person’s word against another, to things that occurred without witnesses. The Crown’s case against Albert Black included the allegation that he had stabbed Jacques because he was jealous of the latter’s relationship with Rita. That has never made sense to me. Rita stayed with Albert far into the night, towards the dawn, tidying his house, listening to him talk and climbing into his bed for sex. Hadn’t Albert already won her?
What she told the jury, as a prosecution witness, was that Albert had threatened to kill Jacques. This was the crux of her evidence against him. Albert may well have said this. If so, it was unfortunate, but the heat of the moment is not always a rational time, especially for the young. What Rita failed to disclose was the extent of his injuries.
What would I have said, if I had been Rita, her life in tatters before her, as the truth of that night, and where she had been, and what she had done, emerged before her parents’ eyes? This is something I cannot answer. It would have been just about the worst thing imaginable, the shame beyond the pale.
Rita and the girlfriends who had accompanied her to the party were granted name suppression. Not so the young men, though I have given them aliases. So what to make of them? We know from their testimonies that most of them had spent the day of Alan Jacques’ death drinking at various hotels in central Auckland. They seem to have had collective amnesia about what they saw. For the most part, I invented their backgrounds. But where they had been and what they had been doing on the day is much as it really was, based on the transcripts of their evidence. Some of what happened in the hours, days and weeks that followed, I gleaned from subsequent newspaper accounts.
A night or two later, the youth who had gone to the police station with Albert had his car tampered with outside Ye Olde Barn. Another witness escaped to Rotorua and went into hiding. He had to be escorted back to Auckland in order to give evidence for the prosecution. Another youth called Claude Quintal, known as Pooch, had landed in borstal in Invercargill by the time of the trial, and was prevented from giving evidence. He would spend the rest of his life telling anyone who would listen that he had information that would have saved Albert Black from execution.
There is a theme here of witnesses who were absent but wanted to give evidence, and witnesses who were deeply unwilling to be there at all. Pooch apparently asserted that it was rolling Alan Jacques onto his back that killed him, not the stab wound. The pathologist disagreed with this, and presumably he knew better. But he did describe the wound as ‘flukey’. What sets Pooch’s evidence apart is that he was isolated from the other youths in the months after the incident.
In the fraught minutes that followed the stabbing, these young people did what they thought best, fearing, perhaps, that they might be implicated in the death. It’s possible they then regretted it. There’s an image that haunts me, of the café cook, a man called Laurie Corrington, running down Queen Street, screaming, his apron covered in blood. Later, he would speak to reporters of ‘that poor kid who was killed and only had his suitcase and nowhere to go’. I find this poignant. I find this the story of two young men who had reached the end of their tether.
If Alan Jacques appears as the villain in this story so far, I think that’s only partly the case. At worst, he was imitating a cardboard cult figure, too handy with his fists, an adolescent acting out his fantasies. Rather, I believe that this is a tale of poverty and unemployment, of abandonment and prejudice, of immigration gone wrong.
For me, Albert’s claim that he was defending himself is credible. I like to think that if I had been on that jury, I would have found him guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter. All the jurors were male, not unusual in the 1950s, although women had been eligible to serve on juries since 1942. It’s hard not to imagine that a more gender-balanced group might have been more open to the circumstances of the case. In his lengthy summing up – longer than the time it took the jury to find Albert guilty – Judge Finlay said: ‘If there was no assault in the café, there was nothing against which Black had to defend himself, and if there was no insult there was nothing to deprive him of his self-control.’ It was immaterial whether the fatal blow was a fluke or not.
Gentlemen, if I may seem to express any view of my own upon the facts, I want you to know that it is unwittingly that I do it … I thoroughly support Mr Davison’s plea to you [for the defence] when he asked you to forget all you have read or heard about this case. It is difficult in a community like ours not to read the newspapers and not to know something about a case before it comes to adjudication. It is difficult for people not to discuss beforehand such cases as that.
So there it is: a trial that should not have gone ahead because prejudiced material was put before the jury, a judge excusing himself for his own remarks, witnesses whose evidence was variable, and those whose evidence was suppressed.
A friend of mine, who was a student teacher at the time, was present when the verdict was brought in. He had raced to the court with his mates when word travelled that the jury was deliberating. But their excitement would soon drain away. He still recalls the sense of chill in the air as the jury returned, the silence as the guilty verdict was delivered, the way the judge arranged the scrap of black material on his head that proclaimed the death penalty before the words were spoken. He remembers a pale girl who was led away weeping.
Prejudice was the basis of an application to the Court of Appeal in November, the month after the trial. The appeal was dismissed in an eleven-page summary.
Back in Belfast, Kathleen Black was desperately trying to gather support for a petition to save her son’s life, which she planned to present to Clifton Webb, the High Commissioner for New Zealand, based in London. In the space of a week she collected twelve thousand signatures; this in a city where few people had telephones and word of mouth was the main form of communication. She wrote to the Queen, mother to mother, although Her Majesty may have been distracted when the letter arrived, as her sister, Princess Margaret, was that week renouncing Group Captain Peter Townsend, a divorced man, as her prospective husband.
Kathleen was also praying as well as pleading. She decided she would make the journey to New Zealand to put the case in person for clemency for Albert and, even if it failed, say goodbye to him.
None of it worked.
And this is where the New Zealand government’s role and that of the Mazengarb Report come up for scrutiny. The attorney-general in Sid Holland’s hanging government was a man named Jack Marshall, later prime minister and knighted. As it turned out, Clifton Webb was no friend of Kathleen. He wrote to Marshall saying that he hoped he had spared him the visit of another murderer’s mother to New Zealand: he was referring to the case of Frederick Foster, who had been hanged earlier that year. Marshall concurred with this view, denying Kathleen entry to the country and turning down pleas for mercy. The Blacks did have an advocate in the form of health minister Ralph Hanan, who added his entreaties to spare Albert’s life. But Marshall, supported by Holland, was unmoved. The process marched steadily towards its grim conclusion.
Based on newspaper reports, here is how I perceived scenes at Parliament on 30 November 1955 when the Executive Council, the highest formal authority of government, met to decide Albert’s fate:
It’s a short meeting. The Prime Minister, Sid Holland, remarks again on the undesirability of men like Albert Black in New Zealand. If they can’t be sent back to where they came from, they have to be prevented from pursuing further crime in New Zealand. The reports on him suggest a highly immoral lifestyle, something that he and his friend Mr Mazengarb aim to stamp out. It will not just punish the crime that has been committed but serve as a short, sharp reminder to those who follow reprehensible modes of living and are sexually promiscuous.
Ralph Hanan says, ‘So Black is to be made an example in respect of the Mazengarb Report?’
‘None of them were up to any good. The youth who was killed had been reading banned books. He even modelled himself on one of Spillane’s characters.’
‘So two men die, thanks to Mr Mazengarb. Aren’t we, as a government, succumbing to lynch law?’
The Attorney-General rolls his eyes, and the rest of the Council members sigh and look away.
The Prime Minister says that unless there are any further objections, it will be recommended to the Governor-General that Black’s execution take place forthwith.
There is a time frame for the procedure. Once the Council has made its recommendation the penalty must be imposed within seven days. Hanan looks at his colleagues one at a time, until they look away from him and drop their eyes.
Hanan would become a major and successful advocate for the abolition of the death penalty. But that was of no help to Albert.
In the last weeks of his life, Albert converted to Roman Catholicism, presumably out of respect for Bessie Marsh, who was carrying his child. He was supported in this decision by Father Leo Downey, well known for his good works among Auckland’s prison population. During this time Albert also wrote numerous letters to friends he had made on the ship coming out to New Zealand. Peter Simpson kept his letters and later gave them to the family Albert had stayed with in Naenae. I have copies and parts of them appear in This Mortal Boy. They are the work of a thoughtful man who has grown into himself as he examines his conscience and accepts his fate. Peter, like many of his friends, would never stop mourning him. Albert died on 5 December 1955, just over a fortnight before Christmas.
There is a wind that evening, a noisy buffeting wind that lifts the canvas like a ship’s sail in a storm. The scaffold is a high steel structure, with a platform reached by way of seventeen steps. Around the supports at the bottom of the gallows canvas has been lashed to conceal the space beneath. The whole scene is lit by a powerful electric light. The light shines on the white rope coiled beneath the gallows and on the noose hanging over the trap. The hangman stands waiting at the back of the platform, his back to the observers.
Albert appears, led by his guards. He doesn’t walk along the polished corridors; rather, he shuffles because his body is harnessed by broad leather straps. The straps are crossed around his arms at the elbows, his crossed hands strapped in front of him, and his legs pinioned above the knee. In some ways, he resembles a log of wood, or a five foot eight tree stump. To further ensure that his body is as rigid as it can possibly be made, he wears a stiff canvas coat and a pair of heavy boots provided by the prison.
He ascends the stairs slowly, and the hangman turns to meet him. In the bright light Father Downey sees that the hangman is dressed in a felt hat pulled low over his brow, sunglasses hiding his eyes. His chin is sunk in the collar of a long topcoat buttoned all the way up the front.
Albert is facing Horace Haywood [the prison superintendent]. ‘Have you anything to say, Black?’ Haywood asks.
Albert turns and looks down on those assembled beneath him. In a grave voice, he answers, ‘I wish you all a merry Christmas, gentlemen, and a prosperous New Year.’
Less than five months had elapsed since the incident at Ye Olde Barn Café. Three months after his death, his daughter, referred to as E. H. in the novel, was born. Albert has grandchildren too.
2
Newspapers were allowed only one reporter at an execution and they were under strict instructions to report nothing more than such details as time of death and how many people were present. Jack Young of Truth defied the rules and wrote exactly what he saw in language that moved his audience. A wave of revulsion for the death penalty followed.
It was this account, and public debate and protest, that strengthened Ralph Hanan’s arm when abolition was put to the test in Parliament. By that time, he was the justice minister in the National government, elected in 1960, led by Keith Holyoake. Hanan was a man with a good instinct for public sympathies. In 1957, during the last months of the Holland administration, one more person had been hanged. His name was Walter Bolton, and even now, there are some doubts as to whether he did poison his wife. Between Albert’s death, and abolition in 1961, there had been a second three-year Labour government, which again suspended the death penalty. Hanan saw an opportunity to reform the situation and remove this hit and miss political approach to executions once and for all. As justice minister, it was his responsibility to introduce the bill ratifying the penalty, but when he did so, he made his disagreement with it known. He convinced nine of his party colleagues, including Rob Muldoon, to cross the floor and vote with the Opposition, thus abolishing the death penalty.
If Hanan emerges as something of a hero in this saga, I am aware that other of his views were more conservative. Some contemporary historians see him as no great friend to Māori, believing that some of his legislation was detrimental to their welfare. It’s hard to fathom how people balance out their priorities, or how, when in power, they determine the fate of others. Hanan remains an enigma to me. He died when he was sixty from complications of a lung condition contracted during his war service.
Writing This Mortal Boy involved years of research. There is a moment of troubling realisation that comes in a writer’s life, or it does for me anyway, when a book presents itself and you know, somehow, that you have to do it, you can’t brush it off. In a way the research is a kind of procrastination, a delaying of the moment when the book must be started, the transformative act must begin. But I’ve always heeded the words of John Steinbeck who once said that it was best to get the research done first so that the process of writing would not be constantly paused while the hunting for background and ‘facts’ took place. I think he was right. For the act of researching takes you closer and closer to the characters, to the long months in which you must inhabit them. There were many days when I found myself inside the head of Kathleen Black and her desperate pleas for clemency for her son. I became that mother, a part of me living her anguish. And I didn’t have to look far for Albert. I’d seen him for so many years of my life – the father who never went home, who mourned an Ireland from which he came but to which he never really belonged, as he didn’t belong in New Zealand either.
I interviewed dozens of people, including Albert’s friend Richard, whom I visited with my publisher and enduring friend, Harriet Allan. I have worked with Harriet for over thirty years. She is part of this story. Although we quizzed him about what he had witnessed at the milk bar, the police did not, deeming him and his companions unreliable.
Richard is in his eighties now, becoming frail but as clear headed as any youth. He lives alone in an immaculate Waikato apartment, home to his precise and detailed model ships.
I talked endlessly to the historian Redmer Yska, who had already written about Albert in his book, All Shook Up, and who provided me with transcripts of the trial and swathes of other material – not least Jack Young’s account of the hanging.
I travelled to Belfast, where I’d talked my way into an invitation to the city’s writers’ festival, via my London publisher, and got put up in a historic high-end hotel for a week. I walked the streets where the Black family lived, stood in the cathedral where Kathleen and Albert senior were married, spent hours ensconced in the Linen Hall Library and was made welcome by the staff at births, deaths and marriages, who treated my search as if it were their own. A cousin of mine, an architect who had designed prisons, had access to the closed section of Mount Eden. I stood on the spot where Albert was pitched into space by the hangman, and I wept.
If this sounds vaguely like an acknowledgements section that should come at the end of a book (and did when I wrote the novel), it’s actually about the lengths you go to, to find a way into a story. And to get it as right as you can.
The person I talked to the most was Ian. He knew Auckland in the 1940s and 1950s like the back of his hand. As a child during the Second World War, he had lived with his grandparents in a run-down building in Parnell called Paddy’s Puzzle, the subject of another early novel. Young women who lived there entertained American servicemen, so Ian knew how the ‘Yanks’ or ‘the American invasion’, so called, had divided opinion and changed the face of youth culture. Ian often got to eat candy when there was too much of it for the recipients. He remembered the nylon stockings the Americans brought, their ice-cream sodas and their flowers, and the venereal diseases the girls in the building suffered. And during the 1950s, he had been a student in Auckland and seen it with different eyes again. How long would it take to walk from here to there? I would ask him over breakfast. Or tell me about the dance halls – what dances did you go to? He could recite the names of streets, ones I would often walk along during trips to Auckland, trying to soak up the feel of them, even though so many of the buildings that were there have gone.
As on some earlier books, Ian had become my collaborator. When I told him a day or two after I had written the end that I didn’t feel the story was over, his eyes lit up. ‘Another cause,’ he said. He was glad, however, that I had ‘come back’. He felt that I’d been away for a long time. I knew what he meant, though I didn’t like to admit it then. I’d been consumed by that book and returning from it was hard.
I didn’t find Albert’s family when I was in Belfast. I had wanted to, especially for the sake of his daughter, whose birth was still an active secret. Since the book emerged, all the Belfast family that is left or known to exist have come forward. There is a cousin twice removed, and a very elderly aunt, but no sign of Daniel. I learned that Katheen and Albert’s marriage did not survive Albert’s death. I imagine their grief driving them apart, laying bare their differences, as so often happens when a young person has died a sudden or violent death. The family story of who did what, in order to save Albert, has varied over the years. Would I have written my book in any other way had I this access when I started? Perhaps in the detail, but not in the broad outline. Their fictional lives are still, for me, a passionate preoccupation, and a burden.
A postscript. One day not long ago I flew to Auckland and met Harriet. She was dressed in a quilted green jacket and sturdy boots, well prepared for walking.
We set off for Waikumete Cemetery, where Albert is buried. Armed with plot and row numbers in the Roman Catholic area of the huge cemetery, we thought it shouldn’t be too difficult to find him. I had seen a photo of Pooch Quintal beside his grave, taken not long before his death. Pooch is bald and sad, wearing a fleecy-lined jacket and holding a black hat. In the accompanying article he is quoted as saying that he wanted to take Albert’s remains home to Ireland to bury them beside his mother. Time, the item said, had washed away the name on the white cross that was shown.
The entrance to the cemetery was planted in fragrant purple stocks. The women at reception were dressed in black, though one had immaculate fingernails all painted white, except one that was bright red. They were kind and solicitous and interested in our search. In their burial records, Albert is shown as having been buried in Catholic E Row 8, Plot 70 on 6 December 1955, the day after his death. That doesn’t match up with information that he was buried first in the courtyard; perhaps that was a holding point while a grave was prepared. Or perhaps the record is simply skewed and he really was taken straight to the cemetery. As we would discover, he is something of a mirage.
The sky was wide and pale grey above the natural basin in which the cemetery lies. The rows of graves are named like streets, and all the names are those of flowers or trees. We made our way along Amber Crescent, appropriately named on that wintry day, for a vast plane tree was shedding its foliage in soft drifts, bright scarlet on one side, turning gold on the other. Further on, we were showered by the pale lemon leaves of a gingko.
Soon we had left the bright trees behind, as we ploughed down a bank and found ourselves in a small gully squelching with swamp beneath our feet. None of the graves quite matched the numbers we had been given and there were many white crosses washed clean of any name. Harriet, who is a better map reader than I am, decided on one that lay beside the headstone for a small child. The graves are in order of date of death. In that row, according to the list of graves we had been given, lie two Williams, a Daniel and a John, all with unmarked graves. The one Harriet spotted had a cross sunken almost to its horizontal bar in the swamp, covered with rushes and a plant that could have been wild marsh iris but would be revealed only in spring. We made our way back to the office, where it was confirmed that we had identified the right place.
We went back and took photographs. I wished I had taken flowers; instead, I plucked a head of paspalum grass and dropped it among the rushes.
After that, we went in search of Alan Jacques, or Johnny McBride as he liked to be known. He was said to be in the Protestant Division A, Row 5, plot number 62. It was barely round the corner from Albert. On our way there, we came across a tidy headstone for Frederick Foster, the young Englishman who had shot his girlfriend in another café further along Queen Street, and was hanged a few months before Albert. Locating Alan Keith Jacques was harder. It took two trips to reception and another printout to find him – or where he might be.
A huge pine tree spreads its roots over Row 5. Alongside the remains of a tilting headstone for a man called Tom Strange, we believe, lies all that is left of Alan Jacques. Somewhere in the swamps and pine trees of Waikumete Cemetery these migrant youths have vanished.
The story of Albert Black, of either of them, is not over. As Ian had predicted, Albert was another cause in the making. This Mortal Boy has been read by interested judges and lawyers who have, with careful restraint, volunteered their view that justice was not entirely served in this case. Even though Albert came from Northern Ireland, the Irish Embassy has expressed its concern, as have supporters at Otago University’s Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies. At the time of writing, a group of lawyers is examining the case to see whether it might be brought back to the Court of Appeal, notwithstanding that any exoneration, or a downgrading of the case from murder to manslaughter, would be brought posthumously. Richard, the witness unheard until now, has made a sworn affidavit, detailing at length what he saw and heard on the night Albert stabbed Alan Jacques in Ye Olde Barn Café.
That is a story still in the making.
Alan Jacques is buried beneath the tree.
The cross marks Albert Black’s grave.
Frederick Foster’s grave.
Grave-hunting at Waikumete cemetery. Photographs taken by Harriet Allan.