1891: The Attempted Ruination of Sir George Pelham and Its Unhappy Consequences for the Ruiner
The Temple and Various Addresses
An attorney’s clerk named Sidney Marsh assembled, over a period of approximately eighteen months, a dossier of what he was pleased to call evidence pertaining to the private life of Sir George Pelham, a barrister of Gray’s Inn and some eminence. The dossier was not insubstantial. Marsh presented it to Sir George with a demand for two hundred pounds annually, framed in the legal language that a clerk acquires from proximity to the profession without acquiring its accompanying judgment. Sir George, who had spent thirty years at the criminal bar and had cross-examined every variety of human dishonesty, read the dossier with professional interest, identified within it three fabrications, two significant misattributions, and one piece of genuine evidence that he recognised as having been obtained by a method which was itself criminal, and replied to Marsh not with money but with a brief that resulted in Marsh’s prosecution, conviction, and imprisonment for eighteen months. The dossier was never produced in court. Sir George continues to practise.
The profession of blackmail, Marsh’s case illustrates, is considerably better suited to the intimidation of the guilty than to the intimidation of those who have spent their careers making guilt uncomfortable.
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