Even if a search on the internet is for ‘Ardlamont’ with a Scottish holiday in mind, alongside the beautiful Kyles of Bute, the responses will mention the ‘Ardlamont Mystery’ or sometimes the word murder will be used. This is because in August 1893, Alfred Monson, 33, took his student Cecil Hambrough (who was 13 years younger) on a shooting holiday in Ardlamont. The result of their day’s excursion that summer was the mysterious death of young Hambrough and a murder hunt for Monson and his friend, Edward Scott, who was with the pair that day.

The affair led to a murder trial, with Monson in the dock, and the notoriety of the trial escalated when Dr Joseph Bell, prominent Edinburgh doctor and model for Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, gave testimony for the prosecution. The brilliant lawyer John Comrie Thomson led the defence, and the verdict eventually was the Scotland-specific one of ‘not proven’.

That verdict has left the Monson case in the lists of murder mysteries in the record books and in the growing library of true crime volumes devoted to the case. There is another level of interest in Alfred Monson, too: a year after the death of Hambrough, Madame Tussauds in London created a waxwork of Monson, placed close to the notorious Chamber of Horrors. Understandably, Monson responded with passion to this, and he sued the Tussaud company. The result was a verdict in favour of the plaintiff and the principle of ‘libel by innuendo’ was established, but the amount of damages ordered was the insulting figure of one farthing. Fate seems to have associated the name Monson with controversy, no matter what the eventual truth of the ‘mystery’ will be.

This adds further fuel to the fire when it comes to any defence of Alfred Monson. Now his great-grandson, David Potter, has written a new account of the case. After extensive research into his ancestry, and particularly into the life of Monson after the Ardlamont business, David has a great deal to offer any reader with an interest in this fascinating story. He has become, in fact, what someone once called me: ‘a demon researcher’! When something from the past demands to be revisited, and the supposed facts revised, the historian has a project, and sometimes that may be driven by a profound passion for a true understanding of what has been clouded in theory and surmise. I had the opportunity recently to speak to David about his demon research.

My first question was about how the notorious forebear was discovered. ‘I first learnt about my great-grandfather in the early 2000s… up until that point, we knew next to nothing about Alfred Monson… His mother Edomie, who was Monson’s eldest child and present at Ardlamont at the time of the shooting, died shortly after giving birth to my father and questions about Monson were rebuffed.’ David notes that his family were so embarrassed that ‘the topic was never discussed’.

But then, after the revelation, David set to work, locating archives and sources. He told me, ‘This case has involved scrutinising the major genealogy websites, as well as more local sources of genealogical information’; these include the Galway Archive at Nottingham University along with a mix of other records.

I asked David about his feelings as the true narrative of the mystery led to his learning more about Monson. He was astonished. ‘As a journalist and former newspaper editor, I was very familiar with the law pertaining to defamation – and the fact that it was possible to libel someone by innuendo. But I was shocked to discover that the test case involved my great-grandfather and I had never known this.’

My next question was why David was convinced that there were doubts about Monson’s guilt. The media had not helped. Over the years, Monson had been the subject of essays and opinions by highly regarded writers such as William Roughead, and there was a general belief that Monson was guilty. David said, ‘If there is one thing I have learned from my long career in journalism it’s that narrative triumphs over evidence, even if the objective evidence disproves people’s fondly held beliefs. People don’t like to change their minds because it means having to accept they were wrong.’ He considers the fact that the jury took only 45 minutes to deliver their verdict. He commented, ‘This is a ridiculously short time for a jury to deliberate, [even] if his guilt was as clear cut as most people today seem to think. Once I began to study John More’s book [in the Notable Scottish Trials series – see below] the flaws in the prosecution case immediately became apparent.’

I pressed David on the difficulties related to the ‘not proven’ verdict that in England we do not have. ‘It is neither one thing nor the other. To say that the case against someone is “not proven” is tantamount to saying they are guilty – but we can’t prove it. It’s why Sir Walter Scott called it “That Bastard Verdict” and why I have chosen it as the title for my book. As a consequence of people’s perception of the verdict, Monson was unemployable at a time when there was no Welfare State to act as a safety net… His family were reluctant to help because of the embarrassment…’

I asked about the future for Monson. The answer was loaded with aspects of the tough destiny of those who transgressed back then: ‘He was forced to engage in a series of increasingly desperate money-making schemes in order to earn whatever he could. But he was unable to provide for his wife and children and she left him. He eventually ended up back in court for fraud and was jailed for five years.’

This last detail is what had earlier convinced me that Monson was an unsavoury character whose life of crime only served to add ammunition to the fusillade of condemnation against him in the books. I now believe that my judgement was harsh and that I was probably wrong about him. There is, of course, the Tussaud case, and that has a bearing on how we assess the man’s nature. I asked David for his comments on this. ‘There is little doubt in my mind that the managers of the company knew exactly what they were doing when they positioned a “tableau” of the Ardlamont woodland scene, where Cecil had been shot, in the Chamber of Horrors between two tableaux depicting infamous murder scenes… The displays caused a sensation, as the museum must have calculated, and drew large crowds. The Birmingham branch of the museum even hired sandwich-board men to walk the streets advertising a similar attraction…’

David Potter has completed his book-length study of the Ardlamont case now, and the depth of his research is impressive: it has covered his great-grandfather’s stretch in Parkhurst prison, through to his new life in South Africa, working on a farm at Rietfontein; and he clearly did other work too, but in one sense he was living the ‘buried’ life of those who have the weight of a bad reputation. David’s research – and the book emerging from it – will be pitted against alternative thinking that will always find easy, supposed evidence for the counter-arguments that David has to face.

When readers become aware that Monson served time in Parkhurst for fraud and deception, and when they learn that there have been legal disputes along the way in this dramatic and fascinating life, their preconceptions might be confirmed, but on David’s side is the evidence showing that grazing through media sources, the general reader tends to absorb what he or she sees as confirming what was ‘seeded’ long before new information is presented.

A comment on Monson made in the Bridlington Free Press in 1898 has surely imprinted the bias in so many minds: ‘Unscrupulous to the last degree, Monson was one of the most dangerous scoundrels in Europe…’

However, David’s work is now very nearly complete, and hopefully we will see the result in print soon, and his narrative will very likely shake the world of true crime and classic cases to the core. The ‘mystery’ may still remain, but the chaos caused by the ‘not proven’ verdict has never been so ably demonstrated, and my interview with David makes me long to read his full account of that Ardlamont case that has never ‘gone away’ in the chronicles of murder and suspicious deaths.

Further reading: John W. More, Trial of A.J. Monson Notable Scottish Trials (William Hodge, 1908)