Nat Gould

His life and books


The Beck Case

Nat Gould wrote a letter of support on 17 August 1895 from Newhaven in Bedfont to the Daily Mail journalist George Robert Sims 1847-1922 who tirelessly campaigned from 1896 to set right one of the gravest and most blatant miscarriages of justice that has ever been known in a civilised country, the Beck Case (1).

Adolph Beck, an innocent and respectable Norwegian man, was accosted by a woman who claimed that he had tricked and robbed her. Despite his strenuous denial, he was arrested and charged with that and similar crimes. He was tried at the Old Bailey, convicted and sentenced to seven years' penal servitude breaking stone on the Isle of Portland. The evidence of mistaken identity was huge, but ignored. Public outrage, led by George Sims and Arthur Conan Doyle, mounted until the authorities were finally compelled to release Beck on parole (!) in 1901.

Incredibly, in 1904 Beck was arrested again for a similar crime, and returned to prison while another trial was prepared. By a sheer fluke, while in prison, another man was arrested for robbery and immediately identified as the villain by the women who had accused Beck. He was pardoned (!) and awarded £5000 (2). A Commission of Inquiry led to the formation of the Court of Criminal Appeal. Poor Adolph Beck died a broken man in 1909.

Nat Gould's support for the campaign was honourable, and typical of him. As a pressman himself, he fully supported the campaign of fellow journalist George Sims (3).

References

(1) Mitchell Library, the State Library of New South Wales, Australia : ML DOC 1380 Letter 1. This is one of the very few letters of Nat Gould that are known to have survived.
(2) A summary of the work of G.R. Sims in this case is given in his article "My Reminiscences" in The Strand Magazine volume 37 (1909) pages 31 and 32.
(3) For more details of the letter and G.R. Sims see Nat Gould: The Biography by Tom Askey (2017) pages 86-87.