The Drummond Affair (eBook)

The journey down to the south of France that took the Drummonds several days in that summer of 1952 can be done today in closer to ten hours. Modern autoroutes and more efficient cars have vastly reduced the time – or, at least, that is the case for most of the year. Not, though, at the beginning of August when the roads are jam-packed with Parisians, Dutch and Germans all heading in that direction for the traditional month-long break. The traffic jams then – aptly called bouchons (corks) by the French – can stretch for miles, providing plenty of time for those so inclined to contemplate the Drummonds’ terrible end and wonder at what secrets lie in the beautiful and rugged countryside of Provence even now, yet come to light almost three-quarters of a century later?

There are still a few pilgrims who go to visit the graves of the victims. The funerals for all three were conducted two days after their bodies were discovered. They had been taken some 10 km away to the local hospital in Forcalquier, a small town of less than 3,000 people that had been Provence’s capital in medieval times. After the post-mortems were complete, the bodies rested in the hospital chapel until a Protestant priest was located to conduct the service. The chapel was tiny, only just big enough for a few mourners. Jack’s godson and a couple of his colleagues from Nottingham were able to make the trip. The Marrians, the friends the Drummonds had met in Villefranche, were also there, as was the Consul General from Marseilles.

Jack, Anne and Elizabeth made their final journey together by horse-drawn hearse to Forcalquier’s beautiful yew-lined cemetery with spectacular hillside views of the Provençal landscape. It was another stiflingly hot day. The locals followed the cortege in their Sunday best, accompanied by holidaymakers in bright summer attire. The outrage at the crime was still raw and many locals were in tears. Flowers were piled outside the chapel and strewn along the route by local children. Then the three simple plain oak coffins, each adorned with a wreath (‘To Elizabeth from Grannie’ read the one for the little girl, touching in its simplicity), were lowered into the ground. Elizabeth lay in between her parents. Some peace for the child, it is to be hoped, after the appalling tumult. But there is something not quite right about the scene. A detail out of place that points to the chaotic circumstances that have seen them laid to rest here. The family name on each of the headstones has been misspelt. Just the one ‘m’ where there should be two: ‘Drumond’.

There are remnants of the tragedy on the road where it occurred too. The mulberry tree near the site of the killings is still there and you can see the pockmarks on a stone wall where some of the bullets ricocheted. At the spot where Elizabeth fell is a homemade wooden shrine, well tended to this day, adorned with ribbons and surrounded by teddy bears. Totems of the violence and innocence that collided here. But in France, those who still remember the crimes do not speak of the Drummond murders. To them, they are routinely l’affaire Dominici. To those of us looking back on the events from a historical distance, this is troubling. It is too often that the names of victims are treated as secondary to those of the perpetrators of monstrous crimes. It is why almost everyone has heard of Jack the Ripper but only a few of us could name any of his victims. But in the case of l’affaire Dominici, the erasure of the victims is even stranger. Jack the Ripper’s victims were not public figures, unlike Jack Drummond. Sir Jack Drummond, let us not forget. His was a name that was known up and down the land. Yet at the moment of his slaughter and that of his family, his famous name was superseded by that of another. If Jack’s relegation is puzzling, even more outrageous is the sexist manner in which Anne has been shoved into the shadows of history. Why is it that so few people in Britain have any inkling of who this family were? It is rare to find even senior academics in Jack’s own discipline of biochemistry who have come across him.

L’affaire Dominici was a painful episode for France, and one of the most contested cases in the nation’s history. Yet in Britain, it has all but faded from memory. The seemingly inexplicable and savage massacre of the family of one of the country’s most esteemed scientific figures ought to have been a touchstone event. The Drummond murders should be one of those shared cultural reference points that everyone knows about, at least vaguely.

In France, there have been numerous books about the events,1 along with major films2 and hit TV shows.3 But there has been nothing comparable in the homeland of the victims. Even at the time, there were far fewer serious obituaries of Drummond than might have been expected. Today, his groundbreaking work – for which Anne deserves vastly more credit – is hardly known by those who don’t have a specific academic interest in it.4 So, what has prompted this collective case of amnesia?

Is it possible that the death of Jack and his family was nothing so much as a great big inconvenience for certain parties? A source of potential embarrassment or discomfort? Was Jack perhaps not all that he appeared – or perhaps he was all he appeared, and more besides? Well known for his public health work, was he also involved in other work that was rather less well known about?

In part, this book aims to rebalance history. Jack Drummond is a forgotten hero. The story of him and his family has been hijacked. The mystery of their murders holds a compulsive fascination, but it is only one aspect of their tale. And even when it comes to their deaths, they have been rendered as little more than extras, incidental victims in a French melodrama. Ever since that hot summer night in 1952, the truth of what happened along the route nationale N96 has remained elusive and fiercely debated. It seems that our best chance of uncovering the answers lies as much in understanding the victims as in studying the apparent perpetrators.

The mystery of the Drummonds’ deaths quickly turned into a French saga of bumbling gendarmes, class conflict and a judicial system under scrutiny. In short order, interest in the Drummonds was replaced by a focus on the perceived botched police inquiry and the possibility of a gross perversion of justice. These are, it is true, all elements of the story but they came to dominate and ultimately obfuscate the truth.

An unhelpful legend grew up around the bizarre theatre of the killings. Where sober minds were required to look outwards for the truth, instead they turned inwards. The case became a conduit for French introspection. With each new newspaper editorial, book, documentary and film (the vast majority originating in France), the truth receded. The evidence suggests that while a beautiful corner of France was the setting for the drama, its nature was much more international in scope.

When the news of the murders hit the British press late on 5 August 1952,5 Jack Drummond was a well-known name, someone who had saved the lives of innumerable individuals. As such, there was an immediate outcry both loud and sincere. The horror of the crime was compounded because of the fate of young, innocent Elizabeth. It was headline news for two days. But soon the clamour subsided. The process of forgetting began. The story was supplanted on the front pages by the arrest of two Royal Navy sailors accused of stealing a taxi in Tokyo, and so causing a deterioration of relations with Japan. The Drummond case, commonly illustrated with affecting photographs of little Elizabeth, was consigned to the inside pages for a few more days, and then … a curious quiet. There was sporadic coverage when the case took on its many unexpected twists, but not the intense focus one might have expected.

With all this in mind, we hope this book will go some way to transforming l’affaire Dominici into ‘The Drummond Affair’. Not just a titular change but a fundamental re-slanting of the entire narrative. This story is part murder-mystery but it is biography too. It is high time that Jack Drummond is resurrected from the fate he has suffered as a footnote in others’ histories. His life, remarkable in so many respects long before it was cruelly cut short, is worthy of a biography regardless of the manner of his death. His wife, Anne, was a woman of note too, and the extent of her contribution to her husband’s groundbreaking work is ripe for reappraisal. The more their story is studied, the more vividly they emerge – not as poor victims of a seemingly random act of brutality but as living, breathing individuals leading authentic lives of adventure and achievement. People who left a positive mark on the world in an era marked out by conflict and destruction.

Piecing together the evidence from contemporary accounts, personal memoirs and official documents, we have come to realise that the solution to the question of what befell the Drummonds in Provence almost certainly lies in better understanding who they were as people. It is a quest for truth that has taken us down some unexpected paths and thrown up more than a few surprises along the way. At times, it has been spine-tingling – like when a handwritten note jumps out from the margins of a letter stamped ‘Top Secret’. A few scrawled words here and there that point in the right direction far more effectively than reams of carefully crafted official documents.

By returning the...