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Dining with Daisy

Dining with Daisy

Poisoning is a dark and potentially deadly sub-set of the culinary arts. Whether real or imagined, such alimentary accusations almost always include food and/or drink as the mechanism for murder.

We are what we eat and ate – especially as it pertains to poison. This week marks the 88th anniversary of the sentencing of Daisy de Melker. What does our ongoing obsession with South Africa’s most infamous and iconic insurance collector tell us about our current culture?

Daisy de Melker’s trial began at the Johannesburg High Court on 17 October 1932. The accused was indicted for murdering two husbands and one of her children. The state was ultimately unable to prove that husbands Cowle or Sproat had died of strychnine poisoning but on 25 November 1932 Judge Greenberg found Mrs de Melker guilty of poisoning her son, Rhodes, by way of arsenic in a flask of milky coffee and a cheese sandwich. She was sentenced to death and executed on 30 December 1932.

The case attracted unprecedented local and international interest. The New York Times called her “the Borgia of the Transvaal”. The Rand Daily Mail published photographs of all-night queues at the courthouse entrance and police cordons preventing the crowd from mobbing the accused. The Star reported that on the final day of the trial, some spectators who had “waited overnight to ensure a place in court, sold their seats for up to 30 shillings each!”.

The state’s papers pertaining to Rex v Daisy Louisa de Melker have been destroyed but the trial record survives among the Maisels’ Collection at William Cullen Historical Papers archive at the University of the Witwatersrand. Legendary lawyer Israel Maisels later led the defence of Nelson Mandela, among others, at the 1956 Treason Trial but in 1932 he was junior counsel to de Melker’s defence lawyer, Harry Morris – who subsequently defended the accused in Kenya’s infamous 1941 White Mischief murder trial.

The Maisels’ papers reveal a seemingly ordinary, white South African, middle class milieu. Dora (no surname is given) the domestic worker describes in her trial testimony that poison was kept in an old Mrs Balls fruit chutney jar and that “the madam” insisted only she should pack what is repeatedly referred to as “Master Rhode’s scuff tin”. Arsenic-induced muscle cramps were massaged with Zam-Buk. Ginger beer was offered to sooth stomach pain but declined.

Daisy de Melker. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Daisy’s behaviour seems to have been both completely conventional and utterly odd. Defence character witnesses described her as a conscientious homemaker with a fondness for baking. Her second husband Robert Sproat was observed eating dumplings and drinking beer with his wife immediately before he became ill and died in 1927. She displayed what might kindly be called a total lack of empathy when it came to her dealings with her grieving in-laws. In addition to all sorts of funny business about the will and pension fund payouts, Sproat’s family were deeply disturbed by her behaviour at his Brixton cemetery burial when she loudly “expressed to a friend her fears as to the fate of a fowl which she had left on the stove” as the coffin was being lowered into the grave. In mid-March 1932 Daisy’s dead husband’s brother William Sproat read of Rhodes’ death in the Rand Daily Mail obituary column and contacted the police. 

The fowl faux pas notwithstanding and with the obvious exception of her penchant for killing husbands and sons, Daisy de Melker seems to have been rather good at playing the part of prim and proper wife and mother. This trait continued into her trial. Bridget Grogan’s 2016 paper Perceptions of Daisy de Melker quotes Herman Charles Bosman as observing that “De Melker attended her trial in the same way that a ‘Duchess patronises a fête of the Women’s Guild’”. Of her six-month sojourn, first at the Johannesburg Women’s Prison and later at Pretoria Central, Bosman wrote that she “left her mark on the prison community, [giving] the place tone… Wardresses began to improve their table manners, drinking their tea in her ‘refined and genteel way’ and adopting ‘an Oxford accent’”.

Let us be clear. All available evidence indicates that Daisy did it. In fact, she may well have been a far more prolific serial killer than her convictions reflect. Her own defence attorney wrote in his subsequent autobiography that De Melker was “suspected of having poisoned seven persons in addition to those in respect of whom she was charged and that three of these cases were being investigated by the Rhodesian authorities at the time of her trial… Rhodesian police remained in Johannesburg for the duration of her trial to arrest her in the event of an acquittal”.

Her notoriety seemingly stems from her inversion of every female stereotype that colonial society held dear. The institution of marriage was considered to be the bedrock of the patriarchal ideal. Husbands were expected to dominate wives. Wives were expected to act as moral guardians of the family. White women were held up as examples of all the presumed superior virtues of their race. English speaking white women carried the additional honour of empire. A murderous, middle class, white, English-speaking wife, especially one who finds new husbands as quickly as Daisy did, was a terrifyingly transgressive creature.

And apparently still is. Ours is a country with lots of murders and more than its fair share of serial killers but Daisy de Melker remains an iconic and regularly referred to household name almost 90 years after execution. Her status as Bogey Woman in Chief stands despite legal and medical advances making her crimes almost impossible in the current context.

In Daisy’s day her poisons of choice were cheap, relatively simple to obtain and found in all sorts of everyday items. They could be easily slipped into coffee flasks and kneaded into dumpling dough. It was an era in which the symptoms of acute arsenic and strychnine poisoning were generally misdiagnosed as other relatively common diarrheal diseases. Mortality rates were sufficiently high that a few extra deaths (which today would be remarkable) were taken for granted.

Daisy came of age at the beginning of the insurance industry when pathologists had neither the skill nor the cynicism to suspect kill-to-claim cases. None of the above applies today. Besides, they have changed the shape of the Mrs Balls bottles. Only the extremely dexterous could get strychnine inside them… DM/TGIFood

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